this is my body

eating and drinking at the end of the world
by jonah james fontela
I remember awful meals. The food on the table was the same, but anger had spoiled it. There was a rot, something seething deep in my father’s eyes. My mother went silent and mean. I sat on my knees in my chair wondering why everything had changed, why there was no laughter or complaining about the stupid administration at the school where they taught kids who needed better than they got. The reasons were usually unclear, especially to a little kid like I was. But one time I remember, specifically, the reasons for a rotten dinner. My father would stay at his desk a few more minutes than my mother liked after she called dinnertime from the kitchen upstairs. The food got cold. This time, rather than sit there and roll our eyes about my father’s quirk, my mother told me to start eating without him. I was in high school; I wasn’t a little kid anymore. I didn’t like it and I knew something was wrong. I knew it in my stomach. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t care. She is full of love, but so ferocious when pissed off beyond repair. Some minutes later, I imagine after hearing our forks clink against the plates, my father emerged from around the corner. He raged. “I wouldn’t treat a dog like this!” He shouted and stormed back down to his desk. He hadn’t heard her call, and I could see in his eyes that he was hurt. Maybe he was ashamed about his hearing loss, his aging. I heard objects slammed in anger downstairs. I looked at my mother and shook my head. Her face was strong and her expression didn’t change.  I learned then, as my mother and I ate in silence, that dinners aren’t always about the food. [Painting: Peasant Family Gathered Around the Kitchen Table by Ferdinand de Braekeleer, date unknown]

I remember awful meals. The food on the table was the same, but anger had spoiled it. There was a rot, something seething deep in my father’s eyes. My mother went silent and mean. I sat on my knees in my chair wondering why everything had changed, why there was no laughter or complaining about the stupid administration at the school where they taught kids who needed better than they got. The reasons were usually unclear, especially to a little kid like I was. But one time I remember, specifically, the reasons for a rotten dinner. My father would stay at his desk a few more minutes than my mother liked after she called dinnertime from the kitchen upstairs. The food got cold. This time, rather than sit there and roll our eyes about my father’s quirk, my mother told me to start eating without him. I was in high school; I wasn’t a little kid anymore. I didn’t like it and I knew something was wrong. I knew it in my stomach. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t care. She is full of love, but so ferocious when pissed off beyond repair. Some minutes later, I imagine after hearing our forks clink against the plates, my father emerged from around the corner. He raged. “I wouldn’t treat a dog like this!” He shouted and stormed back down to his desk. He hadn’t heard her call, and I could see in his eyes that he was hurt. Maybe he was ashamed about his hearing loss, his aging. I heard objects slammed in anger downstairs. I looked at my mother and shook my head. Her face was strong and her expression didn’t change.  I learned then, as my mother and I ate in silence, that dinners aren’t always about the food.

[Painting: Peasant Family Gathered Around the Kitchen Table by Ferdinand de Braekeleer, date unknown]

Fear, joy, sadness, hunger, desire – they were all there on my trip to Japan. A thick broth made of pork bones, with noodles, balancing flavors that made me question the foods I’ve loved all my life. There was the horror of the earth shaking under my feet, the walls of the hotel cracking 50 stories over the denseness of Tokyo, the dread fear of it happening again. Then there was the fish market, a truly amazing place, a seam in the universe where you know you are in the center of something. Blood and fish and pieces of monsters and the chaos of zooming motorized carts. You can be killed by a crate of sea urchins, crushed under the weight of squid. We ate raw fish before eight in the morning and we saw things we’ve never seen before and never will again.

Last night I dreamed a dream of Tokyo, a creation of my sleeping, troubled brain. I walked down long hallways in the dark. Sirens blared. I stood before a large wooden desk where I was forced to take a terrible oath. A giant black wave rose in a boiling ocean. The real thing was far more troubling, and far more moving, than the dream.

Things I love in my kitchen Funnel: A sturdy plastic object. It’s basic, but try moving liquid from one bottle to another without one. Wine, oil, water. It brings me to my grandfather’s garage that I remember only through smells and the sounds of a clacking old cash register and calculator. I played in the black Buick from the 30s with running boards and shades you pulled down to cover the windows. There was a musty smell in the decades of dust in the floor and motor oil on my grandfather’s hands.Pan: I have many pans. Some are deep with high walls, good for stewing and braising. Others are slick and non-stick. I have three cast-iron skillets for meats of all kinds and ways, saucepans too. They all hang in a clutter from a bowed metal bar on the wall. The whole thing once came crashing to the ground, pulled from the dusty plaster with such force and fury that I thought it was the sound of my own death. Among all those pans is one that I love. The perfect size, not for a family, but for two people. The cooking surface gleams metal, but its base is covered with the blackness of years and use, charred on and hard to remove. Once I managed to scrape a small patch of the dark away with steel wool, but Nina marched into the kitchen and protested. Her love for the pan surprised me.Stove-top coffee pot: Thick, heavy metal. Fired by the flames of the stove. It meant parties when I was boy, the ends of huge and noisy meals when I catapulted wine corks and tiny espresso spoons up in the air. My mother and father would have ‘American coffee’ most days, from the percolator machine you plugged into the wall. The espresso was only for mixing with Sambuca and cognac on special holidays. I use mine every morning.  Mezzaluna: I hardly ever use this, a curved blade with handles on both ends. The name means ‘half-moon’ and it looks like one. It was in my Nonno’s house near Pisa when he died in his bed and my mother gave it to me. I hung it on the wall. It’s a simpler, softer way to chop garlic and parsley, the bend in its edge and tiny teeth don’t make the rat-tat-tat chop of a long knife, the terse sounds of a professional kitchen and TV chefs. Labor for exchange. I should use it more. It glides. Pasta machine: Very heavy, heavier even than the espresso pot. It has a vice to anchor it to the counter-top, and a crank. My mother, when she wants to really brag about her son, tells our cousins and uncles in Italy that I make my own pasta. It sends chills through them, and they glare at their own children, in their fancy jeans and sunglasses, accusingly.Rolling pin: The handles were painted red years and years ago and flake off little ceramic bits. I bought it at a junk shop near my first apartment in Boston. It stuck out of my back pocket when I hauled home a high-top table and two stools, the first pieces of furniture I ever bought with my own money. 40 dollars. When I use the rolling pin, I have to pick out little flecks of red, probably poison, paint from the dough. Big cutting board: Nina brought a large cutting board with her when she moved in. The day begins when it is hauled up from the propping place against the wall by the window and banged down on the wooden island. There is a gutter carved all around the edge, like the pencil holder in your grade school desk, that collects the running liquid and blood of a roasted chicken or a hunk of meat. All meals pass over this wood.  Three yellow bowls: Bright yellow, Pyrex, one small, one medium, one large. They all fit together and I use them mostly in the summers for lunches of green beans and salads with anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes and red onion. I found them on the street last year, all nested together, and they remind me of meals in the summer on my Nonno’s screened-in porch, the floor tiles cool as ice under your bare feet.

Things I love in my kitchen

Funnel: A sturdy plastic object. It’s basic, but try moving liquid from one bottle to another without one. Wine, oil, water. It brings me to my grandfather’s garage that I remember only through smells and the sounds of a clacking old cash register and calculator. I played in the black Buick from the 30s with running boards and shades you pulled down to cover the windows. There was a musty smell in the decades of dust in the floor and motor oil on my grandfather’s hands.

Pan: I have many pans. Some are deep with high walls, good for stewing and braising. Others are slick and non-stick. I have three cast-iron skillets for meats of all kinds and ways, saucepans too. They all hang in a clutter from a bowed metal bar on the wall. The whole thing once came crashing to the ground, pulled from the dusty plaster with such force and fury that I thought it was the sound of my own death. Among all those pans is one that I love. The perfect size, not for a family, but for two people. The cooking surface gleams metal, but its base is covered with the blackness of years and use, charred on and hard to remove. Once I managed to scrape a small patch of the dark away with steel wool, but Nina marched into the kitchen and protested. Her love for the pan surprised me.

Stove-top coffee pot: Thick, heavy metal. Fired by the flames of the stove. It meant parties when I was boy, the ends of huge and noisy meals when I catapulted wine corks and tiny espresso spoons up in the air. My mother and father would have ‘American coffee’ most days, from the percolator machine you plugged into the wall. The espresso was only for mixing with Sambuca and cognac on special holidays. I use mine every morning.  

Mezzaluna: I hardly ever use this, a curved blade with handles on both ends. The name means ‘half-moon’ and it looks like one. It was in my Nonno’s house near Pisa when he died in his bed and my mother gave it to me. I hung it on the wall. It’s a simpler, softer way to chop garlic and parsley, the bend in its edge and tiny teeth don’t make the rat-tat-tat chop of a long knife, the terse sounds of a professional kitchen and TV chefs. Labor for exchange. I should use it more. It glides.

Pasta machine: Very heavy, heavier even than the espresso pot. It has a vice to anchor it to the counter-top, and a crank. My mother, when she wants to really brag about her son, tells our cousins and uncles in Italy that I make my own pasta. It sends chills through them, and they glare at their own children, in their fancy jeans and sunglasses, accusingly.

Rolling pin: The handles were painted red years and years ago and flake off little ceramic bits. I bought it at a junk shop near my first apartment in Boston. It stuck out of my back pocket when I hauled home a high-top table and two stools, the first pieces of furniture I ever bought with my own money. 40 dollars. When I use the rolling pin, I have to pick out little flecks of red, probably poison, paint from the dough.

Big cutting board: Nina brought a large cutting board with her when she moved in. The day begins when it is hauled up from the propping place against the wall by the window and banged down on the wooden island. There is a gutter carved all around the edge, like the pencil holder in your grade school desk, that collects the running liquid and blood of a roasted chicken or a hunk of meat. All meals pass over this wood.  

Three yellow bowls: Bright yellow, Pyrex, one small, one medium, one large. They all fit together and I use them mostly in the summers for lunches of green beans and salads with anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes and red onion. I found them on the street last year, all nested together, and they remind me of meals in the summer on my Nonno’s screened-in porch, the floor tiles cool as ice under your bare feet.

The food came and I clasped my hands together in front of my face, bowing my head. When I looked up, my friend, my closest and oldest friend, wore a puzzled look. He thought I’d taken to saying grace, to praying before meals. I hadn’t. I opened my hands to show him the little plastic packet of butter. I was warming the butter, to soften it, to spread on my cornbread. [Painting: A Family Saying Grace before a Meal by Anthuenis Claessens, 1585]

The food came and I clasped my hands together in front of my face, bowing my head. When I looked up, my friend, my closest and oldest friend, wore a puzzled look. He thought I’d taken to saying grace, to praying before meals. I hadn’t. I opened my hands to show him the little plastic packet of butter. I was warming the butter, to soften it, to spread on my cornbread.

[Painting: A Family Saying Grace before a Meal by Anthuenis Claessens, 1585]

I lit the coals. The small alley between the houses filled with heavy smoke that spilled out over the sidewalk and into the window cracks of the rush hour cars. I grilled a mackerel, a fish I know little about, for the first time. After making something new and enjoying it, I write down what I did and keep a file. These are the only recipes I have. My mother passed on no written recipes; my grandmothers left none. My recipes are unusual and fanciful. This is what I wrote last night after eating a whole charred fish with small grilled potatoes in a pouch with butter and green onions and a little too much bubbly wine:

Serve also with boiled green beans. sprinkle everything with course rock salt before eating! Eat with much prosecco and two schizzatos while waiting for the coals to burn in the chimney and the fish to cook. Look up at the leaves of the norwegian elm trees against the sharp blue of the sky with jet lines cutting through it. Eat outside with a dishtowel across your knees. Eat slowly. 

The Russians were drunk. They sat drinking beer in gray t-shirts and thick painter’s pants, their faces that rough red of sun and wind. It was the first warm day of spring, the air still, and they slipped in and out of consciousness on their faded wooden chairs. “Chernobyl” one of them barked, the one who spoke English better. “What work do we do?” he puffed smoke, lifting his shoulders, looking at a polite local. “Building. What else?”

This is my favorite place in the world to drink beer on a warm afternoon. The island meant nothing to me before I met my Nina. It means much to her. She introduced me to its sunsets, the hidden tips of its shores and the salty smells in its winds. She showed me the contrasts and contradictions, the massive influx of rude wealthy beasts that crowd the little island from June to August, the foreign-born workers - Jamaicans, Bulgarians, Irish, Russians - who keep them happy, keep them fed and barefoot on the manicured lawns of their perfect clapboard cottages.

We spend our time there when the island is nervous and anticipating its summer influx, in the spring, or when it slouches, relieved, in September. September is best. The warmth of the sun and water, the empty beaches with their rounded stones shaped by the sea. Swimming in the dying light of late afternoon.

The Russians made me nervous. They were beginning to turn the corner from light to dark. I could see it. “Dmitri, let’s drink wodka,” the one said to the other, an eye closed. The bartender, with the timing of a boxing referee saving a man from certain doom, emerged and put an arm around Dmitri. “There’s a cab waiting for you two crazy Russians,” she smiled honestly. They seemed happy about it. They went back to the bar, made some more noise and finally, with their arms around each other like young brothers in summertime, they stumbled out. Dmitri cradled a long brown paper bag in his arm. It might have been a baguette, but it wasn’t, it was a bottle of vodka. I felt fine thoughts for them at that moment, so far from home on this island.

Dado is the secret ingredient in much of the food my grandfather made. A bullion cube. He used it in quick sauces with vegetables to toss with pasta, many soups, and about a million other things. It’s the Italian word for dice. My mother told me this not long ago, a passing remark. But it’s a secret uncovered, an answer to a question. It brings me closer to knowing, and my Nonno back from his grave.

Dado is the secret ingredient in much of the food my grandfather made. A bullion cube. He used it in quick sauces with vegetables to toss with pasta, many soups, and about a million other things. It’s the Italian word for dice. My mother told me this not long ago, a passing remark. But it’s a secret uncovered, an answer to a question. It brings me closer to knowing, and my Nonno back from his grave.

When my mother was a girl, the woman who lived in the apartment above was called putana, whore, by the other women in the neighborhood. Her husband was American, and she made fried chicken. My mother’s mother fried only little hunks of rabbit in her oily black cast-iron skillet. When the smell of the fried chicken wafted through the air of the stairwell, my mother would sit near the door, waiting, hoping the call would come from the putana upstairs, who knew how much the little girl downstairs loved her chicken, so crispy and golden on the outside and so moist and sticky inside, some magical transformation of a dumb bird.

The call always came. “Laila!” the woman shouted through the halls and stairs and shared spaces of the house on Howard Avenue. “Come up for dinner. I fried the chicken!” I see my mother as a tiny kid, same smile as now in her eyes, climbing steps two at a time for a favorite, unfamiliar food.

My grandmother never objected. To her the woman upstairs, who she rented an apartment to when no one else in the neighborhood would, was no whore. She was pushed around and strapped with a hard time in her life and judged by people who mistook religion and Jesus for scorn and judgment. My grandmother loved those people most, the ones on the outside, and they were always welcome in her home.  

I made fried chicken for the first time last week. Like my mother, I love it. I cut a small chicken apart into pieces, hacking the drumsticks in half and the breasts into threes, leaving all the skin on. I dried the meat with paper towels and tossed it in flour mixed with black pepper and salt and left the pieces in the fridge overnight. The flour and liquid from the chicken skin made a thick paste and I fried it in a heavy skillet in a shallow mix of canola and olive oils.

The meat was moist; the crust was crisp. The breasts cooked faster than the legs. It was a perfect and simple thing with mashed potatoes and green beans. I told my mother about it, about how easy and understandable it was, how she should make it. How it would be simple for her. Then she told me the story about the putana upstairs and I knew she would never make it for herself.

The part of Cambridge where I live is very quiet. Even when blizzards hit and shut down the world, there’s still the sound of the plows dragging their metal across the rough of the road. This is a different quiet, an emptiness waiting to be filled with chaos and violence. I awoke from a dead sleep after midnight. A sound? Something terrible? My heart pounded in my chest. I was afraid and I couldn’t breathe. I sipped from a glass of water on the nightstand, rolled over and lay awake. Sirens filled the air, the rise-and-fall of the usual cop cars mixed with quicker, frantic sounds. A panic noise. Helicopters beat at the air above the house. The birds are chirping this morning – some loud and bossy, some soft and unsure. There are no other sounds. No buses, no taxis, no students on cell phones, no coughing or busted mufflers. Just the radio whispering and the television showing me pictures of the Home Depot in Watertown where I bought all the paint on these walls.

The part of Cambridge where I live is very quiet. Even when blizzards hit and shut down the world, there’s still the sound of the plows dragging their metal across the rough of the road. This is a different quiet, an emptiness waiting to be filled with chaos and violence. I awoke from a dead sleep after midnight. A sound? Something terrible? My heart pounded in my chest. I was afraid and I couldn’t breathe. I sipped from a glass of water on the nightstand, rolled over and lay awake. Sirens filled the air, the rise-and-fall of the usual cop cars mixed with quicker, frantic sounds. A panic noise. Helicopters beat at the air above the house.

The birds are chirping this morning – some loud and bossy, some soft and unsure. There are no other sounds. No buses, no taxis, no students on cell phones, no coughing or busted mufflers. Just the radio whispering and the television showing me pictures of the Home Depot in Watertown where I bought all the paint on these walls.