The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk

Author:Rachel Cusk [Rachel Cusk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571274659
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

Gianfranco’s Store

In the drab grey folds of an English winter we speak of food. What will we eat in Italy? This is one of the details we consider, when we examine our voyage in its theoretical state. Human beings cannot proceed until their fear of hunger has been assuaged. We do not, of course, experience this fear: it is to celebrate its absence that we bring the subject up. There are countries you can go to where this is not the case. When I was a student, a girl I knew went to Russia for a term and came back grotesquely shrunken, with her clothes hanging round her in great vacant pleats. There had been nothing to eat, she said: nothing at all. Her teeth had turned black from lack of calcium. She had taken a two-day train journey in which the only thing she was offered was boiled chickens’ feet.

From the distance of England the Italian cuisine seems to be all things to all people. It does not expect you to bend to its rigour, like the French. It is not rough and boisterous like the Spanish. It is soft and feminine and is adored in the highest circles, though it is not above a degree of prostitution too. But first and foremost it is kind to children. Consider the pizza: all around the world the pizza has come to represent the deepest forms of security known to the human palate. It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface. The pizza has nothing to hide, no dark interior, no subconscious fascination with its own viscera. That is why children like it. Indeed, it is the opposite of haute cuisine, which seems to be predicated entirely on the tendency of children to experience disgust. To eat lungs and livers and whole lengths of intestinal tubing is to declare yourself beyond revulsion and hence mature. As a child I was sent to stay with a French family, and watched in dismay as the mother opened a tin of chicken gizzards for lunch. No doubt I would have learned a valuable lesson in self-control if I’d eaten them. I’d have been as separate and contained as her own children were, instead of the lachrymose creature I remained, awash with emotion and homesickness.

Italian food has been widely taken up in modern times as a counter-ideology, to signal that such attitudes are in decline. Why should one be taught a lesson at supper time? Why should one be made to grow up? And why should one be inducted at all into the darkness of our carnivorous nature? To bathe the palate early on in blood, to harden the body by the ingestion of other bodies: it was to extinguish sentimentality that such practices were inflicted, along with the strap and the cane. But sentimentality, like the pizza, is suddenly all the rage. Let the child’s mouth be filled with comforting Italian starch, with substances that are soft and white and melting, with dough as pliant and soothing as his mother’s breast.

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