Heat (10 page)

“We’re going to need a dishwasher,” Mario told Marcello when their interview was finished. “Do you know anyone?” Mario wouldn’t know where to find the next one. In this, there was a Latin chain: the current dishwasher, Alejandro, would now make the pasta, duties that had been Marcello’s. “Cousins? Someone else in the family?”

I spent a Friday afternoon, paycheck day, with Jesus Salgado. Jesus, who had worked at Babbo since its second day, was the cousin of Miguel, the cook who’d prepared the feminine Bolognese. Miguel was dead. May 19th was the first anniversary of his death, and people were talking about the date with dread. I had never met Miguel but knew about him from Elisa—his knife skills, his understanding of food, his flashy dressing, his charisma: qualities that also characterized Cesar, Miguel’s successor (and cousin), although Elisa insisted that Miguel had been “much sexier.” It was Jesus who had proposed that the restaurant hire Cesar after Miguel died. Jesus had proposed Miguel, too. (Jesus and Miguel “had been like brothers” and shared a business card, both their names on it, which was, eerily, the same card that Jesus handed out now.) Jesus had also proposed his brother, Umberto, who cleaned the restaurant during the day, and Marco, a cousin, who worked in the prep kitchen. Jesus, having recommended them all, felt responsible for them: if they were late or didn’t show, Jesus had to answer for them. For an employer, the informal system was pretty reliable, although it reinforced the distance between the “Latins” and everyone else. The only thing an employer asked for was a worker’s Social Security card (no card, no job), and even after September 11th it is still possible to buy a card cheaply.

Jesus was a natural patriarch. On payday, he gathered the members of his extended family around him—Umberto was wearing a leather jacket and leather shoes; the younger Cesar and Marco were in baggy hip-hop jeans and bright red running shoes, each wearing headphones, swaying to a muffled rappy sound. Jesus had been down to the Babbo basement to pick up their weekly checks and was now leading everyone to a place on 8th Street to cash them (none of them had a bank account), Cesar and Marco following loosely behind, bobbing happily. Afterwards we found a bench in Washington Square Park. I wanted Jesus to tell me about Miguel.

Jesus came from Puebla, in Mexico, about two hours from Mexico City. So, too, did his many cousins. At Babbo, there’s a view that the best pasta makers come from Puebla. The observation was first made by Joe on his realizing that the restaurant had employed three exceptional prep cooks in a row who all came from the same place. I asked Jesus: Do the best pasta cooks come from Puebla?

“Well, it’s a little more complicated,” he said. “
Everyone
comes from Puebla. Most of the Mexicans in New York are from Puebla.”
La migra,
Jesus called it. The migration. Puebla is poor and overcrowded, and New York is a destination city on an immigrant trail simply because someone from Puebla succeeded in making the journey and others followed. “In Puebla, we don’t know fast food. We know only the food we cook. There is a McDonald’s, but I never ate there. I couldn’t afford it. For us, it was a three-star restaurant. A hamburger was a week’s pay. We all cook our food.”

Jesus said that when he returns to Mexico—he hadn’t been back in eight years—his grandmother will celebrate by slaughtering a goat. She’ll rub it with avocado leaves—” the oil from the leaves hides the strong goat smell”—cover it with a paste made from pumpkin seeds, peanuts, chocolate, and cloves, and bury it in a hole of hot coals. “We cook a sheep’s head the same way. A lot of Babbo’s preparations, which are quite rustic, are familiar to us. The skirt steak—that’s a Mexican preparation. Or the grill station—
la barbacoa,
we call it—that’s how we cook our meat. Or braising: that’s how we deal with big cuts. Or a
bain marie:
we call it
baño maría,
which we use to prepare tamales. We have much to learn when we work in a kitchen like Babbo, but we know many things already.” He described a wedding he’d attend that weekend in Queens. “Everyone will bring food—a pig, a turkey, a chicken.” It was the same at Christmas. “The day is spent cooking and being together.” Elisa remembered conversations with Miguel. “He often talked about food he made at home. Cesar is like that as well. They have a capacity to look at a whole kitchen and understand how it works. They both always know what’s in the walk-in and what needs reordering. They know more than most kids coming out of cooking school.”

When Miguel arrived in New York, Jesus looked after him. They lived together, an extended family of cousins, siblings, and friends, in a three-bedroom apartment in the Bronx: three guys in a room, nine guys in all. After Miguel found work at Babbo, he began taking English lessons in a class taught by a Puerto Rican named Mirabella, and the two of them began seeing each other.

Elisa remembers her. “They had problems, and she was always phoning. She was older, and you could hear the age in her voice, but I didn’t know how much older until I saw her at the funeral. Miguel was twenty-two. She was forty-two. Why would a forty-two-year-old woman go out with a twenty-two-year-old?”

Around Christmas last year, Miguel came to Jesus for advice. The relationship had been openly tempestuous, but, according to Miguel, they had sorted out their difficulties. Mirabella wanted Miguel to move in. She had an apartment in Brooklyn. They planned to marry in June.

“I’d never met her,” Jesus told me. “Miguel had never brought her to the house. This puzzled me. There were other things. She always needed money. She had a heart problem and had to see a specialist. Miguel didn’t have much money. He didn’t have enough to be giving it to an older woman with a heart problem. Miguel asked me for my advice. I said he shouldn’t move in.” Miguel asked the others in the apartment. They said he shouldn’t move in.

In the new year, Miguel moved in.

The fights continued. Mirabella was now calling the kitchen every day. There was an insistence in the woman’s tone, Elisa felt, an imperiousness. “The others in the kitchen told me she dealt in some sort of I.D. thing—she bought and sold identities.” At the time, the going rate for a Social Security number was sixty-five dollars. A green card was a little more. A passport varied: a good one could cost several hundred dollars. “None of these kids have papers,” Elisa said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if she gave Miguel a fright about his immigration status. And he feared that if he got in trouble the whole family would be in trouble.”

The relationship didn’t work out, Jesus said. “But because Miguel had asked for our advice and we’d told him not to marry this woman, he felt he couldn’t come back to us. He was embarrassed. He had no place to go.”

On May 18th, Miguel’s last day in the kitchen, he finished an enormous amount of work, Elisa recalls. He did the prep for the entire week. “Then he put his fish knives in a plastic container and gave them to me. I didn’t know what he was doing. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘These are very nice.’” That night he hanged himself from a shower fixture in the Brooklyn apartment. Jesus rushed over on getting the news. It was his first time in the apartment. The police wouldn’t let him see the body.

Jesus was thirty-three but looked older. He has thick black hair, which is stiff like tarred straw, a strong angular nose, and a heavy, scarred face. He has a serious air and an appealing toughness. He phoned his uncle, Miguel’s father. “His grief was unbelievable. Nothing I said made sense to him.”

Jesus paused. The two of us were still sitting on the park bench, surrounded by his cousins and brother, in no apparent hurry, watching us patiently. Jesus was staring fixedly, avoiding me. It seemed he didn’t want me to see the tears welling up like a heavy oil along the rim of his eyes. He took a breath. After a church service, Jesus continued, he arranged for the body to be returned to Mexico. Andy wrote a letter, describing “what a hero Miguel was, because the parents don’t understand what has happened. We didn’t understand. We still don’t.”

Jesus stood up. His household stood up. “We are now very close,” he said, gesturing to the others. “We don’t want this to happen again. We talk. We make sure no one is alone.” He walked off in the direction of the subway, the gang following behind, subdued, everyone with sad, sloping shoulders.

I phoned the police. Jesus carried the name and number of a detective who had been in charge, a Detective Lamposone. I got one of his colleagues.

“Oh, yeah, I remember that night. Mexican kid. Very ugly. Was drinking with his friends and started playing the game with a pistol. He lost. Messy.”

I was horrified: was this why Jesus hadn’t been allowed to see the body? “Oh, no,” I blurted out, startled. “No one said anything about Russian roulette.”

The detective was taken aback. “You know, you’d better speak to Lamposone. I might have the case confused with another one.”

Detective Lamposone had been transferred to another precinct, in Bay Ridge. He had no recollection of the incident. I told him the details, the name, the date. Nothing. “I’m sorry. That one’s gone.”

One morning, about ten months later, I was working in the prep kitchen. I was making pasta with Alejandro, Marcello’s successor. (Alejandro had been the dishwasher on my first day at Babbo.) Alejandro had grown up on a farm, just outside Puebla, and had left when he was sixteen. He had been in New York four years. He was a kid. (One afternoon, when the members of the entire prep kitchen were in the basement, changing back into street clothes—the routine was that everyone stripped down in a space about half the size of a very small closet—Alejandro noticed that Elisa was staring at his belly. For someone so young, the belly was remarkably soft and round. “Mexican men,” he said cheerfully, slapping it with vigor. “Macho potbellies.”)

I had a little Spanish. I wanted to know how Alejandro’s family farm worked—what animals were raised, the vegetables, what was eaten at the family table. Alejandro, while perfectly happy to answer my questions, didn’t have that “capacity to look at the whole kitchen.” This was a job. He wasn’t interested in talking about food, although he was a perfectly good cook. He was interested in meeting American girls. He proposed helping me with my Spanish and, yes, if I insisted, talking about farm vegetables, provided I’d take him to some clubs. Just then Marcello walked in. His wife was outside, in a car. Marcello wanted to show the kitchen his new baby, a bundle of pink miniature girl cradled in his arms, a few weeks old, conceived, I realized, not long after his interview with Mario: in the confidence conferred on Marcello by his new position, he began a family.

People who don’t live in New York don’t appreciate how much the city has once again become fashioned by immigrants and is where you come to become the next thing you’ll be. In 1892, four out of every ten New Yorkers were born abroad. Since 1998, that has been the case again, owing to the arrival, legal or illegal, of immigrants from Latin America, Russia, the Asian subcontinent, Albania, the Baltic states. Both of Joe’s parents are immigrants, ethnic Italians who were living in Istria when it was incorporated into Yugoslavia by Tito: the Italians, long resented since the war (most had been Fascists), were told to assimilate or get out. Joe’s father hopped on a ship and arrived in New York illegally. He was fifteen. Lidia had a marginally more conventional passage and was granted political asylum. “Restaurant work,” Joe observed, “is the lifeline of immigrants in this city.” His father’s first job was in a restaurant; his first home was above a bakery (run by an immigrant). Thirty-five years later, their son, now a co-owner of his own venture, was providing a lifeline for another generation. He employed Marcello, an émigré from Argentina (and not, for all his pasta-making gifts, from Puebla). And now Marcello was secure enough in his new country to begin a family. Someone had died; someone was born.

I
ONCE ASKED
Mario what I could expect to learn in his kitchen.

“The difference between the home cook and the professional,” he said. “You’ll learn the reality of the restaurant kitchen. As a home cook, you can prepare anything any way anytime. It doesn’t matter if your lamb is rare for your friends on Saturday and not so rare when they come back next year. Here people want exactly what they had last time. Consistency under pressure. And that’s the reality: a lot of pressure.”

He thought for a moment. “You also develop an expanded kitchen awareness. You’ll discover how to use your senses. You’ll find you no longer rely on what your watch says. You’ll hear when something is cooked. You’ll smell degrees of doneness.”

Once, in the kitchen, Frankie used the same phrase, “kitchen awareness,” as though it were a thing you could take classes to learn. And I thought I might have seen evidence of it, in how people on the line were cued by a smell and turned to deal with what they were cooking, or in how they seemed to hear something in a sauté pan and then flipped the food. Even so, it seemed an unlikely prospect that this was something I could master; the kitchen remained so stubbornly incomprehensible. From the start of the day to the end, the place was frenzied. In fact, without my fully realizing it, there was an education in the frenzy, because in the frenzy there was always repetition. Over and over again, I’d pick up a smell, as a task was being completed, until finally I came to identify not only what the food was but where it was in its preparation. The next day, it would be the same. (By then, I was somehow managing to put in extra days in the prep kitchen, even though I was technically employed elsewhere.) I was reminded of something Andy had told me. “You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions, and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.” One day I was given a hundred and fifty lamb tongues. I had never held a lamb’s tongue, which I found greasy and unnervingly humanlike. But after cooking, trimming, peeling, and slicing a hundred and fifty lamb tongues, I was an expert.

One morning, Elisa went out to deal with a delivery, and I picked up a change in the way the lamb shanks smelled. They were browning in a large pan about ten feet away, and I walked over, trance-like, turned them, and resumed my task. My nose had told me that they were sufficiently browned and would be ruined in a minute. By the time Elisa returned, I’d removed the shanks and thrown in another batch. She looked at me, slightly startled.