HAVE A HEART #3
We looked at each other in the silence. The memory of Morales’ words hung between us, and I shifted, hunching further beneath the kitchen smock, willing my growing breasts to remain flat, to stay away.
In that moment I wished I was Ifrahim’s son; I wished we truly were kitchen-spirits, untouchable and free.
But I wasn’t, and we weren’t. Ifrahim closed his eyes, and I could tell he too was thinking about his body, his heart made of guts.
He was thinking about the day it would unravel, and take his life with it.
But before that day, he taught me everything he could.
He taught me how to make a batter and coat chunks of aubergine and drop them into hot oil.
I got burns from that – my forearms and hands speckled with red marks – but it was worth it.
Because when the platters went out, drizzled with molasses, I smiled to see people gobbling the morsels, burning their tongues and saying hoh hoh and reaching for their wine.
I had done that. I had burned them, as surely as if I’d walked up and singed their tongues with a coal.
The thought made me almost savage with delight.
I didn’t realize it fully at the time, but by teaching me to cook, Ifrahim was also teaching me how to live, how to carve a space for myself in a world that didn’t want me.
He taught me how to bewitch people; how to change the course of their thoughts – if only for an evening.
Our ingredients were humble; salt and fruit, meat and oil and wine.
But Ifrahim could spin them into a hundred different pleasing shapes.
‘Watch them close, and they will tell you what they want, Ale,’ he whispered, as we stood together at the kitchen door, watching a hard-faced English merchant in the courtyard, who sweated and fidgeted in his pressed suit, eyeing the girls with a nervous scowl.
‘They won’t even know they’re doing it, but watch them and they’ll spill all.
’ He smiled down at me. ‘We’ll be their confessors. ’
That was the day he taught me to make sangria; a drink as old and false as rouge.
He set me to chopping leftover fruit, the peaches that had burst from their skins at the market, slices of bitter orange and shrivelled grapes that no one wanted.
I watched as he glugged Málaga over the lot, so that the fruit began to drink, sucking the sweet wine into withered flesh until it seemed full and luscious once more.
‘Now, how much brandy?’ he asked, nodding at the stern Englishman who sat in the courtyard, fretfully breaking toothpicks into shards.
‘A cup,’ I said slowly. ‘No, two cups.’
Ifrahim smiled. ‘For a fish as cold as that, I believe we will need three.’
The brandy was followed by red wine – cheap stuff from the cooking cask that would leave a headache, but no matter – and seltzer from the glass dispenser. Finally, Ifrahim stirred in his secret: a pinch of pepper, ‘to warm the heart’.
That jug of drink turned the Englishman’s sour face pink, made his narrowed eyes big and bright.
It undid his cravat and sent his hat flying across the dusty ground of the inn.
It sent him upstairs with a girl on one arm and a second jug clutched to his chest. Most importantly, that drink reached into his pocket and emptied his wallet a note at a time with its sticky, red fingers.
All of Ifrahim’s lessons were like that, two-faced as a conjuror’s coin.
He taught me how to gild bad fish with pimentón, how to hammer horsemeat and soak it in wine until the stallion-loving bastards who slummed it at the inn would have made their own mothers swear it was beef.
He taught me how to pilfer more than I paid for at the market, how to protest my innocence if I was ever caught being light-fingered and swear that it was a mistake, that it was only ‘the sun in my eyes’.
Four years of those lessons. Milk puddings and how to cheat at Nap. Fish ‘à la francaise’ and how to tell a person’s wealth by what they ordered to drink.
‘Watch what comes out of their mouths, as well as what goes in,’ he told me, ‘and you will know them for what they are.’
One January day, Ifrahim’s heart finally came loose, and he died. It left me terrified; I was seventeen, and that alone would surely be enough to make Morales rethink her decision – to give me the choice once more of a room upstairs, or the road.
I would choose the road, I told myself fiercely in the night, as the cats whirred against my belly.
I would take my chances outside the inn.
But in reality, the prospect was unthinkable.
The world was not kind to girls like me, with no money and no name.
Even taking what Morales offered might be better than being forced into the same thing miles away, where no one, not even the cats knew me.
So I tried to do what Ifrahim had instructed. I tried to make everyone forget that I was a young woman and become instead a kitchen-thing, a witch of cook-smoke and cleaver, of red face and blistered fingers and saffron-stained nails: desirable to no one, useful to everyone.
I hid beneath the kitchen smock, wore Ifrahim’s rough work trousers and kept my hair tight beneath a scarf, so that if anyone did look at me, they might see a sullen, grubby boy, rather than a woman to be bought.
It was the same with Morales. Whenever she saw me, I made sure my hands were full of something, red to the wrist with blood and gristle or slick with fish tripe and scales.
I kept the kitchen ledger as regular as Ifrahim had, the columns of numbers neat.
I blagged and bartered and stole more from the market than ever, to make her see that I could be economical, that I could run the kitchen better than anyone else.
I asked for nothing, and Morales seemed to accept my presence. So long as I was more valuable at the stove than I was on my back, so long as I charmed and conned the clients with food and drink and kept the accounts straight, I would be safe.
At least, that was what I told myself. In truth, I knew my safety wouldn’t last, just as Ifrahim had always known that the knots of his heart would slip and tumble back into guts in the end.
I just never imagined it would happen the way it did. I never imagined that everything – myself included – would change, so unrecognizably, for ever.