The first change is a realization that I am no longer alone. Even when I’m lying in the dark by myself, I now sense other beings hovering near me. It isn’t just me living in this house, but unfinished love and my dejection and anger and dead Paulie, and their miraculous presence feels as real as my fingernails digging into my hand. The second change is that I’m now more obsessed with cooking, like the Roman gourmets and their cherished chefs, who wanted to put all things wonderful or special or new or majestic or strange or scary-looking on the table. The cooks back then knew only how to bake or boil, but I understand how a few drops of pomegranate juice can transform a dish. The third change is that with these first two revelations, my sense of taste has become ever more sensitive and sharp, my imagination richer. When I got my ears pierced and walked into the street in the middle of winter, I became one large ear. All sensation and pain were concentrated in my ears. My entire body vanished and I floated around the winter streets, just two giant ears. It’s that same feeling. Everything about me disappears and I’m only a pink tongue. This is the time to grow into a truly good chef. I see an increase in customers who specially order my dishes. People come to restaurants for various reasons but everyone really wants the same thing: a delicious meal. A meal that satisfies their tongues. A meal that brings a smile at its close. All of these customers are gourmets—intelligent, sensitive, with good appetites and acute senses. A good appetite no longer is the subject of condemnation or avoidance as it was during the Middle Ages; rather, it’s the height of beauty and nature and enjoyment. I am surrounded by those with appetites, which triggers the desire for taste, for a physical sensation. I want to create the perfect meal.
Slicing turbot in half is an insult to the fish, and it’s rude to have a mediocre cook handle foie gras. Tonight we need to pay the most attention to the table of Mr. Choe, the owner of Mido, who helped Chef become the owner of Ristorante when he was head chef, before Chef renamed it Nove. Chef will cook the entrée, as he always does when Mr. Choe comes in, and I’m to make the second antipasto: asparagus and foie gras. After we returned from Singapore, we became something like confidants to one another. Was it that we each saw the other’s true face that night, normally hidden behind many masks?
I hurry. I take five hundred grams of foie gras, hardened by a sprinkling of salt. It’s dark red with a sheen and it’s firm, like the tongue of a calf. It’s a fresh, good-quality liver. But I smile bitterly. I can’t eat foie gras anymore after I learned how geese were farmed. A cook should eat everything, but even a cook balks at eating certain things, delicious or not. I know cooks who can’t eat poultry or those who can’t eat fish with teeth, like stingray. I can eat crustaceans feeding on spoiled flesh and Milanese sausages stuffed with chopped pig brains, but goose liver is a different story.
A goose hatches in the spring and fattens during the fall. The liver is the best part of a goose. The goose is fed only vegetables in the warm darkness until it’s fat enough, and to make the liver even more tender, to make it the best product, for twenty days it’s fed only dried figs softened in water. A goose has a strong immune system and it’s fairly easy to pull its beak open and force-feed it, allowing for less manpower—but these days, to eliminate even this work, the part in the brain that regulates appetite is removed. All you have to do is paralyze the goose, connect electrodes to the base of its brain, and turn on the electricity. Afterward you cage the goose under artificial lighting and it continues to eat, deep in its hallucinations. Within a week the goose is as fat as if it’s been fed for a month, and so is its liver. If you take out its eyes, you can fatten it up even more.
I rush out of the kitchen and run into the bathroom. It’s as if an eyeless, hallucinating goose is pacing behind me, eating endlessly under artificial lights. I vomit. A sourness rushes up. If you give a goose an egg-shaped rock, it will nestle and protect it without any suspicion. It will look after anything as one of its own, even a cloth doll. Geese develop a continuous attachment to the object they first encounter—the imprinting phenomenon is especially strong in a goose. A gosling develops an unconditional attachment with the first moving object it sees. It could be its mother or a sibling, a cat or a dog, a person or a motorcycle or a tractor. Even if it is the wrong focus of attention, the goose can’t put an end to its unrequited courting. I throw up once more and press the toilet lever with irritation.
You don’t have the right to handle foie gras if you’re imagining quacking geese following a tractor around. You’re a useless artist who has lost all objectivity toward your model. I wash my hands with soap several times and return to the kitchen. I place the foie gras in the center of the dish, then place cold steamed asparagus on a diagonal. I once thought that if love were tangible, it would be a truffle or asparagus. Things that push through the ground. I shake my head. Asparagus has to be cut and eaten when it sprouts in the spring, while it’s tender. If you leave it alone, it quickly turns into a large, fuzzy leaf, growing into a thick pole too big to grip. Asparagus continues to grow even after you cut it, though slowly. If it’s true that I’ve changed, my thoughts on the food and my fingers on the butcher block will be even colder, even more detached. Unlike the kitchen, the world is filled with things I can’t control.
I spear a leftover piece of foie gras and hand the fork to Chef, asking with my eyes how it is. Chef puts it into his mouth and chews, nods once. I put the plate on the pass. Manager Park comes and quickly takes it away—foie gras has to be eaten warm. I’m done for now. I think I have time to take a five-minute break, but I double back just as I’m about to leave the kitchen. If black caviar is the dream of gourmets, foie gras was born from human desire and pleasure. Horatius once said that liver is the seat of passion, the home to sensual love and wrath. I stick the last piece of foie gras into my mouth and hide it under my tongue. I press my lips together and push it down.
CHAPTER 23
WHEN I WATCH gorgeous women mingling, I think I can understand Seok-ju. He wouldn’t have been able to tear his eyes off Se-yeon, a yellow daffodil in dark soil, standing with her head tilted down as if to convey that she didn’t want to be noticed in a crowd of people. He would have met her gaze. There’s nothing shocking about a young architect with a promising future falling in love with a beautiful former model. There just shouldn’t have been a woman called K between them. The architect should have met the model before he met K. Because he was the first man that K had loved, he—they—should have been more understanding, should have been more cautious about their love. There are rules even when you wrench a toy away from a young child. I nod along to the soft techno music that sounds like sorrowful weeping. The people who have gathered today for Wine & Food’s ten-year anniversary party are mostly owners of the best restaurants or companies that import wine or cheese. But there may be even more models and celebrities and stylists and designers. Every time I meet the eyes of the tall and thin and beautiful, wearing great clothes and a mist of strong perfume, I feel my pupils widen as if I’m a man looking at gorgeous women.