The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [60]
I pushed the food around on the plate, cut a small piece. It didn’t taste like chicken. It wasn’t gamey or beefy. It tasted like nothing I had ever experienced, rich without being heavy, meaty but light. The aroma was delicious, herbaceous. Finishing, I told the waitress to give my compliments to the cook, and asked for the sauce recipe. She hesitated as if she didn’t understand, but my Spanish is pretty good. She walked toward the kitchen.
“You’re absolutely right,” said the Drafter from his table.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s the sauce,” he said.
(Of course, I did not know his name then. Later, when he told me it was Edwin, I told him I’d rather call him the Drafter, which to me fit him better. “Yes, it calls up ‘Drifter,’” he said. “It calls up ‘Daft,’” I said.)
The lithe waitress returned, followed by a portly woman in a grease-spotted apron. Wisps of salt and pepper hair bristled out from her blue headscarf. The cook, for that’s clearly who she was, placed her hands on wide hips and recited the ingredients for the sauce. Like the most competitive international chefs, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give their precise measures.
“Write it down,” said the Drafter.
“What?”
“Write it down.”
I took out my notebook and asked the cook to repeat. I thought she might be annoyed, but instead she seemed proud that what she said was being registered, taken down in words. I wondered whether, like many women in these parts, she had never learned to read and write. This time she gave the recipe a title.
Tepesquintle Rodent Sauce
Thyme, laurel, cumin, black pepper, garlic, green or red pepper, tomato, onion, V-8 juice, white wine, cinnamon, honey, consommé, Saborin (like Accent).
She looked over at the Drafter, who was listening intently. Turning to me again, she winked and whispered, “For armadillo, replace the wine with vinegar.”
When I left the restaurant, heading for my hotel, the Drafter followed, catching up and speaking as if he were continuing the thread of a conversation we had begun somewhere, but I had forgotten. “They can be farmed, you know,” he said. “Those raised domestically are indistinguishable to the palate from those in the wild, when prepared in the same sauce.”
He went on about seasoning and spits, chattering in a vaguely public school accent embedded in origins I could not exactly pinpoint. India? The Caribbean? His light skin argued against them, but he didn’t seem British either. I negotiated puddles on the road. I felt confused. My face must have been saying, “What in bloody hell are you talking about? Why are you even talking? Who are you?”
Rounding a corner, he saw my expression, and stopped. At first, his look said the problem was mine, then slowly, his deep brown eyes lost their sparkle. “The tepesquintle,” he said. “I thought you’d be interested.”
That’s when I made my mistake. Or set the course for one of the most memorable weeks of my life. We faced each other on the walkway that runs a ring around the island, which is only a mile across. Modest old houses with pastel color walls were turning luminous in late sun. Waves lapped softly against the malecon.
“Look, let’s have a coffee, shall we?” I said, feeling apologetic about my snooty attitude.
Travelers tend to skip the thousand small steps that begin the journey of social communication, because they already share the road. In Petén, they know they also share interest in, or a need for, a place off the tourist path; the rainforest ruins of fallen civilizations; an atmosphere on the edge of isolation. When travelers meet in Petén they already know a lot about each other, before either says a word.
“I haven’t seen Ceibal or Altar de Sacrificios,” I said, “but I want to go because it means traveling the river that runs past them, the one with the wonderful name, Passion, Rio Pasión.”
We sat on a pier drinking tea laced with the local rum called Zacapa, not the cheap