Various Flavors of Coffee (10 page)

intrigued or alarmed, whether to approve or disapprove of these changes, this physical awakening that is slowly taking hold of her, warming her like an apricot in a glasshouse.

She turns back to the desk, picking up her most recent notes. Apricot—that is one of the flavors they have discovered today, in some of the moccas and the better South Americans; the concentrated golden aroma of an apricot preserve. It will take its place on the chart of flavors, in between blackberries and apples. And then, this afternoon, the Colombian Excelsos yielded a truly remarkable discovery: the precise smell of fresh peas, just as they are snapped out of their crisp, juicy pods. . . .

Straw. The aroma of barley stalks just before harvest, rustling softly in sun-baked fields. Licorice, dark and soft and sweet. Leather, rich and old and polished, like her father’s favorite arm-chair. Lemon, so astringent it puckers the lips . . . As her eyes travel down her notes she finds she can recall each one of them, the tastes bursting across her palate like exotic flowers, each one more powerfully real than the last.

Each one coaxing open the hard, closed bud of her senses a lit-tle more.

When she first had the idea for the Guide, many weeks ago, what interested her most was the potential for
systemizing:
for tak-ing the chaotic, ever-shifting world of human perceptions and bringing to it order and the calm discipline of rational investigation. She had never imagined that it might work the other way round as well: that she would find her own inner calm—her sys-tematic, practical nature—shifting and stretching like some unruly, enchanted plant.

She has not told anyone what working on the Guide is doing to her—not her sisters, and certainly not her father. He has already had cause once or twice to suspect his oldest daughter of dangerous passions: he must suspect nothing now. Besides, he has his own reasons for commissioning this work; not just the obvious ones he

has mentioned to Robert, but certain other plans—commercial schemes—in which it might play a part; it would alarm him to think that its accuracy could be compromised by wayward, schoolgirl emotions.

Schoolgirl—that is exactly it, that is the whole problem. It is because she is a female that she feels this ridiculous sensuality, this weakness for physical gratification. And that is precisely why she must fight it, or—since she has already tried to fight it, and has already found, paradoxically, just how powerful, how strong, this fe-male weakness is—she must disregard it.

She has discovered that she is not altogether a Rational person, yet she intends to go on behaving as if she were.

No man, she is sure, will ever allow women to work alongside him—to vote alongside him—to shape the future with him—if he believes them to be as foolish as she has realized that she is.

Of course, there are women who delight in being foolish.They are the sort of women of whom Emily disapproves. Indeed, Robert Wallis is the sort of young man of whom she disapproves. The realization that her heart—not to mention various other, more secretive organs—seems to be incapable of seconding the judgments made by her head is deeply irritating to her.

She picks up one of the tiny cups in which they have been cupping today’s samples. It contains, still, a tiny morsel of Excelsos, long since cold. But more than that: as she sniffs it she fancies that she can just discern, caught in the cup, the soft aroma of Robert’s breath.

She inhales it, allowing her eyes to close, allowing the brief delicious fantasies to flit through her mind.
His breath and mine, mingling together, like a kiss...

She turns back to the window and breathes it back onto the glass, over her rubbed-out flower.

Like something written in invisible ink, the flower slowly reap-pears, just for a moment, before fading once again from view.

[
thir teen
]

“Green”—a sourish flavour imparted by green beans, immature.

—
michael sivetz,
Coffee Technology

*

mily and I did not only taste her father’s coffees; at
Pinker’s insistence, we also ranked them. Initially I had been reluctant to do this, pointing out to my employer that good and

bad are moral judgments, and as such have no place in Art.

He sighed.“But in Commerce, Robert, one makes such decisions every day. Of course one cannot directly compare a heavy, resinous Java with a delicate Jamaican. But it is the same coin that pays for them, and so one must ask oneself where that coin is best spent.”

It was true that some coffees seemed to be consistently of higher quality than others. We noticed that when we particularly liked a coffee, it was often labeled “mocca”—and yet that word seemed to cover a multitude of styles; some heavy, some light, some with an intriguing floral aroma.

One day I found myself alone in the office, tasting a small lot.

There was no label on the sack, although there was a mark in what I took to be Arabic, a mark I had seen on many of the bags we shipped from that region:

w

I knew as soon as I opened it that this was something special. The dry scent was honeyed, almost fruit-like: when I took the beans up to the office and waited for the water to boil, my wait was accompanied by a delicate perfume of woodsmoke and citrus. I ground the beans in a little hand-grinder: the smell intensified, adding a deep,
basso profundo
note of licorice and clove.Then, carefully, I poured on water.

Suddenly, so thick and full I could almost see it, the bouquet took life. It was like a genie escaping from its lamp, or a gush of steam snorting from an engine, or a fanfare of trumpets, majestic yet piercingly simple. The aroma of exotic flowers filled the room—and not just flowers: there was lime, tobacco, even mown grass. I know this must seem fanciful—to find so many disparate elements in one smell—but my palate was by now attuned to the task, and these were no will-o’-the-wisps: they were precise and distinctive, as real in that room as the walls and windows.

The steeping time was done. I pressed the grounds down with a spoon and lifted the cup to my mouth. For once I did not aspirate: there was no need. The taste was exactly as the smell had promised—the mouthfeel was solid and substantial, with the barest hint of brightness, and the floral flavors filled my head like heavenly choirs. I swallowed.There came a delicious sensation of natural sweetness and a long, mellow aftertaste of green tea and leather. It was as near to perfection as any coffee I had come across.

• • •

“The coffees
of mocca,” Pinker said when I asked him about it, “are not as other coffees. Have you found it on a map?”

I shook my head. He went to the shelf and pulled out a great atlas, its pages big as circus bills.

“Now then.” He flipped impatiently through that vast tome until he had found the page he wanted. “Yes.
There.
What do you see?”

I looked at where his finger was pointing. Where Persia and Africa met, separated by an arse-crack of water, there was a fly-spot. I looked harder.The fly-spot was labeled “Al-Makka.”

“Mocca,” he said.“Or as the Arabs call it, Makka. Source of the greatest coffees in the world.” He tapped it. “This is where it was born. This is the cradle. Not just of coffee—of everything. Mathematics. Philosophy. Storytelling.Architecture.When Europe was lost to civilization, it was the Ottoman Empire which kept Christian learning alive. And yet, today, it is as if they are living through their own dark ages, waiting for history to come and set them free.”

“Why are their coffees so particularly fine?”

“It’s a very good question, Robert. Damned if I know the an-swer.” He was silent a moment.“Some merchants swear that moc-cas have a faint chocolate taste. Some even adulterate other beans with cocoa powder to replicate it.What do you think?”

I searched my memory. “Some have a note of chocolate, certainly. But not the very finest—those seem to me to have an extraordinary fragrant quality, more in the range of honeysuckle or vanilla.”

“My feelings exactly.Which would tell us what?” “That mocca is not one coffee but several?”

“Precisely.” His finger made a circle around the Red Sea.“The Arabs, of course, used to have a monopoly on growing coffee. Then the Dutch stole some seedlings and took it to Indonesia, and the French stole from them and took it to the Caribbean, and the

Portuguese stole from
them
and took it to Brazil. So. Let us be logical for a moment, and assume the Arabs stole it, too.Where might they have stolen it from?”

“Can we ever know?”

“Perhaps not. Did you ever meet Richard Burton?”

I was accustomed by now to the abrupt turns which a conversation with Pinker took—his mind was always racing ahead, seeing where he wanted to take you and then leading you there by easy steps. I shook my head.

“I was introduced to him at a reception,” Pinker said. “There were above five hundred of us there, and he was a great man— fêted, at the time, for his explorations of the Islamic world. He’s less favored now, of course. There were rumors about his private life . . . well, never mind.When he heard I was in coffee, he made a point of talking to me. Held me spellbound, as it happens, as well as the small crowd who soon gathered around us to listen.

“Burton had not long returned from one of his Arabian jaunts—he had darkened his skin with walnut juice, taken Arab dress, and passed himself off as an Islamic holy man. His Arabic was almost perfect, of course, and his scholarship of their texts considerable. He told me of a magnificent walled city he had found, in a part of East Africa that was lush and temperate—a coffee-growing region. In fact, he claimed the coffee there was so plentiful it had never actually been cultivated—the bushes grew wild, propagating themselves wherever the surplus fruits fell to the ground. Coffee traders were considered so important to the economy they were forbidden to leave the city on pain of death. It was a place of great wealth, apparently; Burton talked of ivory, precious stones, gold . . . and what he called some darker transactions. Slavery, one presumes.

“So closed is that city the traders even developed their own language, quite separate from that of the surrounding countryside. But the coffee, Burton said, was the best he had tasted in all his

years of wandering. And—this is what sticks in my mind—he said it smelled fragrant, like honeysuckle blossom.”

“Like that mocca?”

“Exactly. And something else that interested me—the town is called Harar, but the name of that region in the local tongue is
Kaffa.”

“As in ‘coffee’?”

“Burton was convinced the words must surely share a root.” “So the coffee beans that grow wild in Kaffa—”

“—are sold, perhaps, by the merchants of Harar to traders, who bring them, eventually, to Al-Makka. From where they are shipped to the rest of the world. If you were a trader in, say, Venice or Constantinople, you might well label the coffees you purchased by their port of origin, not the place they were grown in. Given the Arab mania for secrecy, you might not even be told which country a particular lot had come from. So you would call everything that passed through Al-Makka ‘mocca,’ just as today, some people refer to all South Americans as ‘Santos.’ ”

“Intriguing. And where did Burton say this Harar was?”

Pinker ran his fingers over the map. In those days atlases were updated and reissued every year or so, the new countries tinted with the colors of the empires that had claimed them. Most of the world, of course, was red—British red—with a certain amount of blue, purple, yellow and so on.When I was a child, Africa was al-most blank. As travelers returned with news of territories explored, named, and added to the tally, so the white had shrunk and the red expanded, nudging inward from the edges of that great continent toward the center. Not all was red, by any means: the French and the Dutch were not going to let us have everything our own way, and the boundaries between the different colors had often been drawn in blood.

Pinker had the very latest atlas—of course.Yet there was still a small part of Africa that, although it was no longer completely

blank, had not been colored, a space the size of a man’s hand in the mid-part of the continent.

He tapped it pensively.“Here,” he said.“Burton places it here.” We both stared at the map.

“What an extraordinary thing coffee is, Robert,” he said at last. “To be able to do good at both ends—temperance in England, and civilization elsewhere.”

“Remarkable,” I agreed.“And even more so when one considers the profit generated in the middle.”

“Exactly. Remember Darwin: it is the profit which makes all else possible. It is not charity that will change the world, but commerce.”

I did not
think any more of that conversation at the time: we were all talking of Africa in those days. Yet Pinker was someone who did not waste his assets. Every shilling must be put to use, and when the Guide was finished, I would be a coin no longer in hock.

The money
was flowing through my own hands like water by now. Wellington Street was not all divans and chignons: any girl would do pretty much anything for an extra sovereign or two, and if your palate was becoming jaded with the possibilities and permutations of
that,
all sorts of other treats were available nearby. Just as London had a flower market and a fish market, a street of silver-smiths and a street of booksellers, so establishments in different areas specialized in the different arts of love. In this quarter one might find Houses of Sappho; over here, Houses of Youth. I feasted on these pleasures as one might feast on the dishes of the Orient: not because I preferred them to my native fare, but because they were previously unfamiliar to me.

And sometimes I found myself being drawn to more dangerous pastimes. I was passing along a quiet quayside one afternoon when I discerned a faint, spicy waft of poppy smoke. It was the work of a moment to identify where the smell was coming from. I slipped down an alleyway in that direction and found myself on a deserted wharf.The aroma led me, as if along a well-marked trail, to a non-descript doorway. From the shuttered windows of the warehouse there came no sound, but when I knocked, the door swung open a crack.A wizened Chinese face looked out. I showed some coins. The door was opened wordlessly and I was allowed inside. On numerous berths and bunks that lined the inside of that storeroom like giant pigeonholes, reaching up into the gloom as high as the eye could make out, men lay wrapped in their coats like Egyptian mummies, or sat propped up on one arm, puffing at the curved clay pipes with unseeing eyes.