Free The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel by David Leavitt Page A

Edward said, taking a seat at the one empty table. I tried to pull out a chair for Julia, but there wasn’t space. She had to slide in sideways. The chairs themselves were low and narrow, with rigid backs. Through the windows you could see the shoes of the people passing by outside.
    “What do you think?” Edward said. “Definitely not the sort of place you’d run into the Duke of Kent.”
    “Probably he doesn’t have the stomach for it,” Iris said as a waiter deposited carafes of wine and water, a basket of rolls, and a ramekin containing what appeared to be fish paste onto the table.
    “Is there a menu in English?” Julia said.
    “Oh, you don’t bother with a menu here,” Edward said. “You leave it to Armando to choose for you.”
    “Lovely.”
    Edward poured the wine, which was amber in color and rather pale. “
Vinho verde
. A specialty of the north, made from unripe grapes. And now I’d like to propose a toast. To us. The four seasons.”
    “Four seasons?”
    “Yes, since all of them are represented here tonight. Mr. Winters, with his summery wife, Julia. Then me—Freleng is almost
frühling
, isn’t it? And the autumn-blooming Iris.”
    “But irises bloom in spring.”
    “Not all of them do,” Julia said. “A few bloom in autumn.”
    “Do they?” Iris said. “I didn’t know. As Eddie will tell you, I’m an idiot when it comes to gardening.”
    We toasted, and for a moment Iris’s small, wet, very blue eyesmet mine. There was in them a vulnerability at odds with her sardonic tone. Or was the sardonic tone merely defensive, a child’s fists beating against intolerable knowledge?
    Soon Armando returned, bearing a tureen of thick, brownish-red soup, which he ladled out for us. To Daisy he gave a bowl of water and a kidney. Tasting the soup, I could not help but wonder if a kidney had also been involved in its preparation—that or some pig’s blood, for it had a distinctly metallic flavor. Offal holds no fear for me. I dug in with gusto. So did Edward. Julia, on the other hand, took one sniff and cringed, while Iris—such was her enthusiasm for the
vinho verde
that she appeared hardly to notice the soup, which in any case was soon cleared away, to be replaced by a steaming casserole of duck and rice atop which slivers of chorizo sausage lay curled.
    “This is the specialty of the house,” Edward said. “It’s prepared like an Italian risotto, then put in the oven so the rice gets crisp.”
    He dolloped some onto my plate. How different this was from French food! “In French cooking,” I said to Edward, “either you get the purity of a particular ingredient—for instance, mâche in a salad—or you get a flavor that defies you to identify any of the ingredients. Here you get both.”
    “Exactly. The rank pungency of the duck meat, the acridity of the chorizo, the … How would you characterize the rice?”
    “Rice doesn’t have a taste so much as a texture. It’s something for the palate to resist.”
    “Listen to them,” Iris said to Julia. “Why can’t men talk sensibly? It’s only food.”
    “And then the collective flavor of each forkful,” Edward said, “which almost brings tears to the eyes, because there’s something so, well, nostalgic about it, yet it’s entirely new … I mean, you can tell that, for someone, this is the food of childhood. Nor does itmatter that it’s not your own childhood. The past—some collective notion of the past—comes alive in your mouth.”
    “Been reading Proust lately, have you?” Iris said.
    “I think I could live here,” Edward said, “if I could learn the language. The language—that would be the challenge.”
    “It sounds like Russian to me,” Julia said.
    “Of course, it’s easier to read than to speak,” I said. “When I look at the newspapers, I recognize maybe half the words.”
    “Speaking of Portuguese,” Iris said, “do you know what the locals have taken to calling our own Suiça?