Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Travelogue 5, Spain: Meet the Parents

My dear friends and family, Here I lay in front of the fire like an anaconda trying to inch down a wild boar. Today’s lunch is not setting well with me and while I was hoping it would hurl itself up and out with the grace of an acrobat exiting a trampoline routine, it has opted to torture me with a slow decent to the basement door at the rate of a 90-year-old- tackling a downhill flight of stairs.
Today I went to meet The Parents, Marta’s, of course. It was not the social encounter that has caused this indigestible indigestion, but rather the meal itself that’s got my guts all twisted up. First out of the oven came Marta’s step-father’s lunch, baby goat brains, baked in the very skull that houses them. He scooped them out with a spoon as if he were savoring the ripe flesh of a rare, succulent fruit. He offered me some, and I politely declined, which I’m sure he knew ahead of time would be my response. Thank God there was a vase of carnations between my end of the table and his. When he ran his tongue along the xylophone of intact teeth bridging mandible to sinus cavity, I ducked behind the flowers like a lightweight in the ring with Ali.
Really, none of this scene should faze me as I have seen my father devour the carcass of all the indigenous creatures that run, hop, crawl, swim or fly through the forests, streams and meadows of Mangus Hollow, Virginia. I remember one night he plopped down in the middle of the supper table a boiled mud turtle, fully intact, but, of course, with its head hanging low and its eye sockets empty. “Ya’ll dig in,” he announces to my brothers and me as we squinted up a face of disgust. Then he gave the same response we heard every time we protested a mystery meat, “Aww, just eat it. It’s good! It won’t hurt ‘cha!” Jesus, to a six-year-old staring at Timmy the Tortoise scalded alive in his own shell, that’s not a very convincing sales pitch.
I’ve digressed--back to lunch. For Marta, the nephew and herself, Mom slapped onto a platter three chunks of raw steak fried just enough to gray the flesh of the outer mini-milimeter. She took a pair of scissors from the drawer and with them cut an inch of fat from the edges of each with the agility of a four-year-old cutting snowflakes out of shag carpet with sheep sheers. Marta had told her mother that I don’t eat red meat, which to me means anything that stands on four legs, but to Spaniards only seems to exclude creatures that they wave red flags at and then run from. So, she pulled from the oven for me a round dish with the ribcage of some vertebrate fanned out in a spiraled pinwheel. It was pretty, no denying that, but of one thing I was sure, if I partook of it, I would be sick. I can count on one hand the number of times I have eaten 4-footed animal flesh in the past twenty years. Every time it has been due to a social obligation I couldn’t squirm out of, and every time I paid the price. My body is just not accustomed to digesting red meat anymore. If the source of protein swims or clucks, it goes down just fine, but if it moos, oinks or bhaas, I may as well ingest a hot coal and have a gasoline hot-toddy before retiring.
My stomach twisted in my abdomen, I twisted in my chair and thought to myself, how in the hell am I going to get out of this one? The woman who I most need to impress the daylights out of has gone out of her way to prepare something special to accommodate my dietary restrictions and for me to reject it will get us way off on the wrong foot. As I eyed the costal windmill and racked my unbaked brains to come up with a strategy, I spied floating in the grease around the ribs, a brown, slick ball. Mushrooms! God had provided some sort of vegetation, kind of, for me to eat! That it was cultivated in manure, at that moment, was the least of my concerns. I stabbed one eagerly.
“You know that’s a kidney?” Marta’s mother says.
“No, I thought it was a mushroom. I saw you come in with a bag full of them.”
“No, no,” she responds, “those are for tomorrow.”
Indecision. Return the perforated organ to the platter or put on that I’m a connoisseur of animal innards. I wimped out and scraped the thing off my fork on the edge of the dish and it plopped back into the grease. What was I to do? These were the people with whom, if this relationship works out, I’m going to have to deal with weekly, if not daily. Eat the meat and have a bellyache for a day or refuse the meal and live with bellyaching for the remainder of my days? The choice was clear. So I pinched a rib and delicately brought it to my plate. For about three minutes, with knife and fork, I tried to remove the quarter size piece of meat from the bone and drag off the kite tail of fat glued to it. I’m sure out of pure pity Step Dad says, “The best part of eating ribs is sucking the fat off the bone. Just pick it up with your hands.” Without a word, Mom discretely took a rib and modeled. Just as discretely I observed out of the corner of my eye the slurping in of a string of pure, 100%, unadulterated fat, as if it were a spaghetti noodle. I almost gagged. I tried to do it once, with moderate success, but just couldn’t stomach a second attempt. So, I nibbled off all of the reddish flesh and decided on the magic number of four. If I could just get down four of the sixteen in the dish, that would be one quarter of the whole, which is one half of half and my dad’s nickname for me is Half-Pint…so when they comment on how little I’ve eaten, I’ll tell them I’m living up to my name, which, whether or not they actually find amusing, will force them to laugh because it will be obvious that I meant for it to be funny and social norms dictate that they at least release a sniggle. That will break the tension. Done. Four should suffice to keep me in good graces.
I arranged and rearranged the discards on my plate trying to make it look like there were more there than actually were. I know the in-laws were appalled by the amount of “food” I left clinging to the bones, but I just couldn’t eat them clean after the one attempt at fat slurping. Almost immediately, nausea started swimming laps in my stomach. With a sweaty palm, I man-handled my greasy, mangled napkin to distract myself from the throwing up I knew I needed to do. With the bathroom directly across from the kitchen there was no way they wouldn’t hear, so I just kept swallowing hard, for two hours, through dessert and politics and sports and brags about the grandkids.
It’s six hours later, and here I am prostrate, rolling around in front of the fire, writing to you and praying that the reptilian tactic of basking in heat will promote digestion. Other than the previously described familial hiccup, all is well. I’m living the country life of my childhood, cutting wood for the fireplace, hanging the clothes out to dry and waking to rooster crows. We go to town most days to use sister Alma’s internet and take care of practical matters.
Hope all are well. Send news. Much love, G

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