By then we were all very mellow, so we toasted his chances in another round of that exquisite liqueur. After which we drove back to Guex.
Carefully.
Arriving at his hotel, we said goodbye in a flurry of alcoholic bonhomie, exchanging names and addresses though I don’t think we honestly imagined we would meet again, for tomorrow was the last day of the congress, and the Baron had said that directly after the funeral—scheduled for the morning—he was obliged to return to Paris.
But we did in fact cross paths next day. As we were emerging from the cinema after the closing ceremony of the congress, a large black limousine passed which unmistakably belonged to a firm of undertakers. It stopped and backed up, and from its window the Baron called a greeting. With him were three other passengers, all men.
And, although I’d only seen him for as long as it took me and my wife to shake hands with the Baron and confirm our intention of getting in touch again one day, I was certain that one of them was the same who now was bringing in a trolley from the kitchen, on which reposed a dish whose lid when lifted freed into the air the concentrated version of the odour I had already detected in diluted form.
I was instantly detached from the here and now. I had to close my eyes. Never have my nostrils been assailed by so delectable a scent! My mouth watered until I might have drowned in saliva but that all my glands—the very cells of my body!— wanted to experience the aroma and declined to be insulated against it.
When I recovered, more at a loss than ever, I found that something brown and nondescript-looking had been dumped on my plate, which was chipped; that a half-full glass of red wine as sour as the white had been set alongside, while the Baron’s water glass had been topped up; and that he was eating busily.
Busily?
This was not the person I had met last year. That version of the Baron not only cared about but loved his food—paid deliberate and sensitive attention to every mouthful of any dish that warranted it. Now he was shovelling the stuff up, apparently determined to clear his plate in record time. And that was absurd. For, as I discovered when I sampled my unprepossessing dollop of what’s-it, its flavour matched its aroma. I had taken only a small forkful; nonetheless, as I rolled it across my tongue, choirs sang and flowers burst into bloom and new stars shone in the heavens. I simply did not believe what I was eating.
In the upshot I was reluctant even to swallow that first morsel. I had never dreamed it was possible to create in the modern world a counterpart of ambrosia, the food of the gods. I was afraid to let it slide down my throat for fear the second taste might fall short of the first.
When I did finally get it down in a sort of belated convulsion, I found that the Baron had cleared his plate and was regarding me with a strange expression.
“Ah, you must be enjoying it,” he said.
Even as I sought words to express my delight I could feel a tingling warmth moving down me—down not so much in the gravitational as in the evolutionary sense, to lower and lower levels of being, so that instead of just registering on palate and tastebuds and olfactory nerves this stuff, this stew, seemed to be transfusing energy direct into my entire system.
But I did not say so. For I could suddenly read on my host’s face what I could also hear unmistakably in his tone of voice: such hopelessness as Mephistopheles might know, something which would be to despair as starvation is to appetite. He spoke as a man who, after long and bitter experience, now knew he would never again enjoy anything.
* * *
The tissues of my body were crying out for that miraculous incredible food. I fought and thought for half eternity except that in retrospect I judge it to have been seconds.
And pushed away my plate.
I doubt I shall match that act of will until my dying day. But it was my turn to rise to the occasion, as he had done for stranded foreigners at Guex, and trust to being helped over the consequences.
He stared at me. “Is it possible,” he inquired, “that in fact you do not like it?”
“Mais oui!” I cried. “I do! But . . .” It came to me without warning what I ought to say. “But it’s the only food I’ve tasted in my life which is so delicious that it frightens me.”
In one of his books William Burroughs hypothesises a drug to which a person would become addicted after a single dose. I had perhaps had that remark vaguely at the back of my mind. Without having read it, possibly I might not have— Ah, but I had, and I did.
There was a frozen pause. Then a smile spread over the Baron’s face so revolutionising in its effect it was like the spring thaw overtaking an arctic landscape.
“I knew I was right,” he said. “I knew! If anyone could understand it must be an artist of some kind—an author, a poet . . . We shall withdraw so
