Read Online Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson
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One of the victims, a green woodpecker, was in turn converted into a tasty mouthful by glazing and truffling.
12
The more I see of Marta’s place, the more I’m reassured she can’t have bought it and will just be renting it. That little rogue Benedetti must have split his sides at finding an idiot foreigner actually willing to pay hard cash to take the place off his hands. I suspect her of having an acute lack of funds so it can’t be very much, but the house’s lack of Position is the clincher. Those fifty-odd metres make all the difference and render it very much less advantageously placed than mine. No doubt there’s less incentive for her to get out there and create a garden to make the most of what view there is, although I notice she or someone has laid waste to a football-pitch sized area at the back with a brush-cutter. Meanwhile, I can only assume it was written into the terms of the lease that she should leave the interior looking like a Beatrix Potter illustration: damp brick floors, rusty iron range, cobwebby windows. One expects to see Mr Tod sidling down the flagged passage to the back door, glancing over one shoulder with a cocky grin of bared teeth.
I was enjoying such reflections having returned to my own bright kitchen, now smelling so agreeably of newly baked Fish Cake. Although the way she lives is none of my business, I still find there’s nothing like a visit to Marta’s to inspire me to fresh zeal. The view from the window of my own terrace is enough to remind me that the only thing standing in the way of a perfect panorama is that veteran privy: unreconstructed relic of a peasant past. Suddenly I can bear it no longer. I don suitable gear, collect a few stout tools and set off to deconstruct it.
Years ago in the feckless wanderings of a gap year I found myself travelling by bus in Bolivia. Or was it Ecuador? Somewhere, at any rate, with that standard Latin American mix of vertiginous mountain roads, a bus with no glass in its windows and bald tyres, impassive Indian women passengers in bowler hats, and a matinée desperado at the wheel who periodically removed both hands from it in order to groom his heroic coiffure in the driving mirror. My internal voice was long since hoarse with shrieking and I had lapsed into the numb fatalism that can only be interrupted by a very few major urgencies. One of these was now making it imperative that we stop in the next five minutes. I had already checked the reassuring wad of tissues in the pocket of my rucksack and was going forward to order the driver to pull up when we swung into a mountain village over a hen or two and stopped by a rambling shack calling itself a bar. I was out of the bus and through that bar like Road Runner, leaving twisters of dust behind me. My face was probably more communicative than my Spanish; at any rate I was directed straight to the back of the building where a privy stood with its door hospitably ajar. Springing inside and banging the door to I found the only light came from a hole in the floor: a crusted circle about a foot across. I was in no state to argue. Mere seconds later I was panting in that squatting position so familiar to desperate travellers, sweaty face on knees, in a blissful state of release. I was able only to take in that disaster had been averted by a whisker, that life would go on and for all I cared the bus could too, without me. Gradually my senses returned even as I fumbled for the tissues and began to take in for the first time the unsteady planks of the floor, the drone of bluebottles and – most interesting of all – the view beneath me. The hole of this jakes afforded the sight of a stupendous gulf of blue air: a vertical drop over a chasm so deep I might have been in a helicopter. A thousand feet below my dripping rump lay stained and wicked crags above which my eye caught the slow wheeling specks of vultures sizing up myofferings. It was the first time I had experienced vertigo in a
12
The more I see of Marta’s place, the more I’m reassured she can’t have bought it and will just be renting it. That little rogue Benedetti must have split his sides at finding an idiot foreigner actually willing to pay hard cash to take the place off his hands. I suspect her of having an acute lack of funds so it can’t be very much, but the house’s lack of Position is the clincher. Those fifty-odd metres make all the difference and render it very much less advantageously placed than mine. No doubt there’s less incentive for her to get out there and create a garden to make the most of what view there is, although I notice she or someone has laid waste to a football-pitch sized area at the back with a brush-cutter. Meanwhile, I can only assume it was written into the terms of the lease that she should leave the interior looking like a Beatrix Potter illustration: damp brick floors, rusty iron range, cobwebby windows. One expects to see Mr Tod sidling down the flagged passage to the back door, glancing over one shoulder with a cocky grin of bared teeth.
I was enjoying such reflections having returned to my own bright kitchen, now smelling so agreeably of newly baked Fish Cake. Although the way she lives is none of my business, I still find there’s nothing like a visit to Marta’s to inspire me to fresh zeal. The view from the window of my own terrace is enough to remind me that the only thing standing in the way of a perfect panorama is that veteran privy: unreconstructed relic of a peasant past. Suddenly I can bear it no longer. I don suitable gear, collect a few stout tools and set off to deconstruct it.
Years ago in the feckless wanderings of a gap year I found myself travelling by bus in Bolivia. Or was it Ecuador? Somewhere, at any rate, with that standard Latin American mix of vertiginous mountain roads, a bus with no glass in its windows and bald tyres, impassive Indian women passengers in bowler hats, and a matinée desperado at the wheel who periodically removed both hands from it in order to groom his heroic coiffure in the driving mirror. My internal voice was long since hoarse with shrieking and I had lapsed into the numb fatalism that can only be interrupted by a very few major urgencies. One of these was now making it imperative that we stop in the next five minutes. I had already checked the reassuring wad of tissues in the pocket of my rucksack and was going forward to order the driver to pull up when we swung into a mountain village over a hen or two and stopped by a rambling shack calling itself a bar. I was out of the bus and through that bar like Road Runner, leaving twisters of dust behind me. My face was probably more communicative than my Spanish; at any rate I was directed straight to the back of the building where a privy stood with its door hospitably ajar. Springing inside and banging the door to I found the only light came from a hole in the floor: a crusted circle about a foot across. I was in no state to argue. Mere seconds later I was panting in that squatting position so familiar to desperate travellers, sweaty face on knees, in a blissful state of release. I was able only to take in that disaster had been averted by a whisker, that life would go on and for all I cared the bus could too, without me. Gradually my senses returned even as I fumbled for the tissues and began to take in for the first time the unsteady planks of the floor, the drone of bluebottles and – most interesting of all – the view beneath me. The hole of this jakes afforded the sight of a stupendous gulf of blue air: a vertical drop over a chasm so deep I might have been in a helicopter. A thousand feet below my dripping rump lay stained and wicked crags above which my eye caught the slow wheeling specks of vultures sizing up myofferings. It was the first time I had experienced vertigo in a
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