Do you cry when you chop onions? Sure you do. Everyone does, Badass Chef Livia included–this week she cries us a river and an ocean, because she has to make French onion soup. But these tears are strange tears, and they do strange things to everything they touch. I know some of you are thinking Como Agua Para Chocolate, or Like Water for Chocolate if you read it in English. But I swear to god I wrote this before Isabel Allende’s novel was even drafted. I just got distracted by life and very, very lazy about trying to publish it… At any rate, Installment XIII (thirteen! throw that salt over your shoulder, right now, doesn’t matter which one) of our serialized and salivationary (just made that word up) novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), is served, wherein things get even weirder in the kitchen. For one, a chocolate tart almost drowns.
In case you missed out on the prep-cook phases of this party, you can get all caught up by clicking right here, and remember: don’t lick the spoon and then put it back in the pot. Livia’s watching you.
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Rosewater
But there had been other unexpected turns of events during Livia’s shift which were not so easily remedied. Livia had brought along her black canvas bag instead of the usual, economical backpack. Inside the bag were the two-piece black suit, the corset, the sandals, the garter belt, and the silk stockings. Also, one of the chocolate tarts that Livia had prepared late the previous evening.
The tiny cabinet beneath her workstation was full; there was no room for the cumbersome bag. Livia turned back toward the changing room. The air there was stagnant; it was hot. Since it was only April, the Hungarian owner had not yet brought down his mismatched collection of ancient electric fans. With some regrets (Livia wondered about the effects of the heat on the pricey makeup with which she accompanied her clothes for sex), she stashed the bag in her locker.
As she was returning to her workstation, Livia remembered the chocolate tart. It would melt if it hadn’t already. She retrieved it. Never mind the makeup–without the tart, the makeup was pointless. Livia would keep the small, midnight-blue package at her station until she began to cook when she would remove it to the walk-in where fruits and vegetables were kept, during the two or so hours she would require the four gas burners. Then she would, she swore to herself, remember to return the package to her station. It wouldn’t do at all to forget it.
~
Livia fretted as she peeled and chopped onions for French onion soup. Why should she have to prepare French onion soup today, of all days? Her eyes were already sensitive (they had hardly closed the night before), and onions made them fill with salty tears, clouded her vision. Livia kept a box of tissues at her station for that very purpose–if you touched your eyes, or even the skin around them, while chopping onions, the results were always disastrous.
Predictably, after two or three minutes of chopping, the pungent fumes found their way to Livia’s eyes. After another minute or so, her eyes began to tear. The tears were surprisingly abundant, moreso than Livia remembered them ever having been before. They filled her eyes before she could even put down the knife; as the metal blade clicked against the white tiles, the tears had already begun to roll down her cheeks.
But there was something curious, something not right, about those tears, which had reached the corners of her mouth. Her tongue, expecting watery saltiness, was shocked and then inexplicably delighted by sweet, cool water. The tears tasted vaguely of roses. Perturbed and intrigued, Livia reached for a tissue. Her eyes were still filling with sweet, cool tears that replaced those that slid gently down her cheeks; the new tears blinded her again, and it was several seconds before her groping hand located the tissue box. It was empty.
Livia was furious; she still had three dishes to prepare. She must continue chopping, tissue or no tissue. She picked up the knife with one hand and wiped at her eyes with the palm of the other, steeling herself for the results. But the contact between her hand and the delicate skin around her eyes did not produce the stinging sensation she associated with chopping onions. The touch was like a caress; it sent darting spurts of pleasure into the tips of her fingers and up her arm, across her shoulder (there was a thumping sensation in the hollow at the base of Livia’s throat) and into the usually tranquil region of her torso, the area that surrounds the heart.
The rosewater tears now fell from Livia’s eyes in such abundance, with such rapidity, that they were forming a pool on the cutting board, moistening the onions, and threatening to spill over onto the floor. The smell of onions, generally so overpowering, had been drowned by the sweet scent of roses. The soup would be ruined.
Two dishes ruined (or, at the very least, compromised) in one shift was too much–her reputation stood in grave danger of suffering. She opened the drawer above her cabinet, yanked out a handful of precisely folded dishtowels and then removed the cutting board, with its burden of onions and the knife, to the ledge beside the empty tissue box. The tears continued to spill from her eyes, making the cutting board just a slightly darker blur against the white tiles.
There was a high, ringing metallic sound as Livia’s knife fell from the cutting board and clattered onto the tiles. Her sense of balance was off, she scolded herself. And hurrying never solved anything. She stepped back and drew a deep breath–get hold of yourself. Then she saw the knife, her best and most expensive knife, which she kept carefully, meticulously sharpened. Her best knife floating (but wasn’t it too heavy to float?), bobbing gently in a sweet-smelling pool of rosewater tears. Livia’s hand shot forward before she could thoroughly consider her actions and grabbed the knife. What Livia, in her rosewater blindness, judged to be the handle was, in fact, the blade.
Livia had barely grazed the edge of the blade with the fingertips of her right hand, but that light brush had been enough to part the soft skin of two of the fingertips. Small, ruby-like drops appeared in the openings made by the knife blade, but she had (although she was aware of her error, and of the ruby drops threatening to drip from her fingers) as of yet, experienced no pain.
Livia grasped the knife again, this time by the handle, and replaced it onto the cutting board. She looked down, ready to wipe up the rose-water tears and get on with her soup, but her eyes were mesmerized by several ruby-red drops that had that fallen into the sweet-smelling pond. The rubies dissolved into the rosewater, making strange patterns of dying red against the white surface. Livia’s eyes were then drawn to another strong color, dense and pure against the stark white of the tiles. Midnight blue on white. The chocolate tart.
“Fuck!”
Livia’s expletive was in English this time; she sliced both beginning and ending consonants with furious clarity.
The pool of rosewater tears had reached the low wall of white tiles, against which she’d placed the tart. The bottom of the tiny package was soaked; the thin layers of paper were almost black.
Livia’s right hand closed over the small, midnight blue rectangle in the following manner: the palm, first, curved protectively over the top of the package, tensed. The four fingers, cupped, formed an inverted basket and scooped up the package, now doubly fragile because of the rosewater tears it had absorbed. The tips of the fingers, from two of which ruby-drops of Livia’s blood were just ready to fall, folded back over the package, protecting it. The ruby-drops were saved from falling by the midnight blue package, and absorbed, first, into its wrapping, which was wet, and then into its contents, where they dissolved into the buttery crust of the chocolate tart nestled inside the paper.
Livia methodically dried the white tiles of her workstation, trying to recover her equilibrium. She’d lost precious time; she would have to step up her pace. The onions, thankfully, appeared not to have suffered from their bath in the rosewater tears. And their pungency was beginning to assert itself over the delicate scent of roses. She had chopped more than she’d thought–some would serve in the base for the basil-cream sauce she was planning, the same one that would, hours later, so delight the Russian gentleman’s tongue.
Such was her preoccupation with the tasks she had yet to perform, that Livia gave no further thought to the tiny midnight blue package. The heat from the burners would, she hoped, dry it out.
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
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