The Perfect Meal (27 page)

M
y weakness for anchovy paste helps explain why my friend Christopher and I were standing on the railway station at Perpignan, in the deep southwest of France, reading the words
Centre de l’Universe
painted in large white letters on the platform.

On the wall overhead, a photograph showed surrealist painter Salvador Dalí striding down this very platform with Gala, his wife, on their way from Spain to Paris with a cargo of fresh insanity. Though he never commanded so much as a canoe, Dalí wore the all-white uniform of an admiral of the Spanish navy, a privilege conferred on him by General Franco, Spain’s fascist head of state, whom he extravagantly admired.

Dalí claimed that, while changing trains at Perpignan on September 19, 1963, he experienced “a sort of cosmic ecstasy,” with powerful sexual overtones. Scholars speculate that this must have been a prodigious erection, followed perhaps by a spontaneous orgasm. In his autobiography, Dalí wasn’t that specific.

It is always at Perpignan station, when Gala is making arrangements for the paintings to follow us by train, that I have my most unique ideas. It is the arrival at Perpignan station that marks an absolute mental ejaculation which then reaches its greatest and most sublime speculative height. On this 19th of September, I had a kind of ecstasy that was cosmogonic and even stronger than preceding ones. I had an exact vision of the constitution of the universe.

He incorporated his vision into a 1965 canvas called
Mystique de la gare de Perpignan
, which shows him blown literally sky-high by the force of his revelation. The French railway system, not to be outdone, commemorated the event by painting “
Centre de l’Universe
” on its platform. I can’t quite see this happening at Grand Central or Charing Cross.

This far southwest in France, so close to the Spanish border, erotic arousal comes with the territory, particularly if it involves the railways. In August 1999, art historian Catherine Millet toured the area with her husband, the novelist Jacques Henric. Mainly she wanted to visit the grave of Walter Benjamin, who wrote the influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and committed suicide here in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis.

In addition to being a respected writer on art and editor of an influential monthly, Millet was, as she had just revealed in her bestseller
La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M
., a tireless sexual athlete and a regular on the Parisian group-sex circuit. She also enjoyed exposing herself nude in the open air and being photographed doing so. At Walter Benjamin’s grave, she posed naked while Henric photographed her. They then went to the Port-Bou railway station, where, as the Barcelona express roared through, she stood with her dress wide open to show the speeding and no doubt incredulous passengers that she was wearing nothing else. Once again, Henric captured the moment.

Millet’s sexual games are harmless, and indeed, like the lady herself, rather charming, as well as being witty comments on the way in which photography changed the nature of art, which is what Benjamin dealt with in his essay. Nudity, real or reproduced, as a means of communication among intellectuals isn’t uncommon in modern French culture. Ned Rorem introduced himself to fellow composer (and fellow gay man) Benjamin Britten by mailing him a seminude self-portrait. Once this got around, people who wished to meet Rorem, including women, sent him similar photographs of themselves, until he was forced to remove his address from the phone book. On another occasion, the countess Marie-Laure de Noailles, patroness of Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Rorem, wished to show her disapproval of the fiancée chosen by one of her protegées. Quietly leaving the salon of her mansion on Place des États-Unis, she reappeared a few moments later in the doorway naked, posed there for a moment, then disappeared again, to return fully clothed. “I just wanted you to know,” she told the bemused couple, “what a real Frenchwoman looked like.”

H
ad any intellectual passing through Perpignan that morning offered a repeat of the countess’s gesture or Millet’s exposure, Christopher and I would probably have missed it. We were too busy sprinting across four platforms to board the slow train for a thirty-minute trip to the port of Collioure, center of France’s anchovy industry.

Christopher once lived near there and had happy memories of its hospitality, its wine, its cuisine, and, of course, its anchovies. But as I clambered onto the train, the absurdity of the expedition struck me. To travel seven hours across France to discover the source of anchovy paste? Wasn’t this as strange as dressing as an admiral or exposing oneself to a train full of tourists? It seems that the region of Catalonia, which encompasses cities such as Barcelona on the Spanish side of the border and Collioure and Perpignan on the French side, induces excesses of this sort.

Collioure came well recommended. Mark Kurlansky in his history
Salt
described it as a busy community where the locals, from May to October, set out daily in vividly painted boats, called
catalans
, to fish for anchovies, which they filleted by hand and salted down in wooden casks. The rest of the year was spent raising grapes for wine and awaiting the moment when the anchovies arrived serenely at maturity.

This Friday in December, however, Collioure had an air of lassitude, even despair. With no cabs at the railway station, we trundled our bags downhill toward the town center. On the way, we passed the bullring. Just some bleachers enclosed in a flimsy metal screen, it hardly deserved the name. In any event, it was now closed indefinitely, since the Catalonian government had just banned the corrida—not out of compassion for the animals but as a gesture to the increasingly vociferous animal-rights lobby. Beyond, the main route into town was ripped up for resurfacing and the laying of new sewer pipes. We had to pick our way among bulldozers and trench diggers. Nevertheless, though it was only midday, not a single worker was in sight nor would there be any until Monday.

In ten minutes, we arrived at the Mediterranean.

“It’s quieter than I remember,” Chris said, looking round the empty quayside.

On one side of the pretty bay, a tower straight out of a pirate fantasy commanded an ocean that, except for a few wavelets rippling on the pebble beach, was motionless. On the opposite point hulked a crumbling stone fortress, the Château Royal, looking as ominous as the Spanish Inquisition. No colorful
catalans
were pulled up on the shingle. As for the local wine industry, interest seemed to end in a couple of cafés, where locals huddled over a
pichet
and studied the lottery results.

A chat with the desk clerk at our hotel brought us up-to-date. In the last three years, Collioure had declined. At one time, Perpignan looked to become the major center of the region, but interest now flowed inexorably across the border to Barcelona, the undisputed magnet for tourism and commerce.

At the same time, the European Union cut the number of days Collioure’s anchovy fleet could fish. But the real problem was the anchovies themselves. Some years, they swarmed just offshore. Lately, however, they’d shunned French waters for those of North Africa, so that any fish eaten next year would be mostly Algerian.

Of the once-thriving fleet, only a few boats remained, and a single cannery, run by the Desclaux family since 1903. We wandered uphill to its headquarters through the empty town, past blocks of holiday apartments with every shutter wound down tight. Cafés, restaurants, even pharmacies were closed for the winter, their furniture locked inside behind windows grilled with steel.

Madame Desclaux greeted us warmly in the chilly but meticulously clean white-tiled shop, and led us around the large room next door, kept up as a museum of the trade. In the summer, women gave demonstrations here of how they tore the fish apart with the only instruments sufficiently delicate to tease out those tiny bones: their fingers. But with no anchovies to dissect, we could only ponder the waist-high wooden barrels where filleted fish matured.

We watched a video of Collioure’s once-great days and mused on the rows of vividly pictorial but now rusting cans, souvenirs of packers who’d gone out of business. François, madame’s husband, appeared in faded denim overalls to guide us through his gallery of anchovy art. The paintings, showing the shingle beach crowded with
catalans
, were mostly amateur, but he did own one work by the most notorious Catalan of them all, a tiny and puzzling drawing of an ant, flamboyantly signed “Dalí.” An ant? Not so strange, Christopher explained. To Dalí, ants signified death and decay. As a child, he’d come across a dead bat crawling with ants and been traumatized. Maybe the ant was his wry comment on the decline of Collioure.

B
rowsing through this mausoleum of the anchovy industry, I could only think: If only
garum
were still in vogue.

Hardly anyone in Collioure would know of
garum
, but in the ancient world, this corner of the Mediterranean was a center for its manufacture. This all-purpose essence was a vital ingredient in Greek and Roman cuisine. Rich in proteins, minerals, amino acids, vitamin B, and a natural form of the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate,
garum
was the universal elixir. It gave savor to meat and fish dishes, and even desserts. It could be mixed with wine or water, both for refreshment and as a medicine. Users swore it cured dysentery, diarrhea, constipation, and ulcers. It also removed freckles, body hair, and even healed dog bites.

Improbably,
garum
was made by mixing fish guts or whole small fish with salt, packing the mixture into vats and leaving them in the open for weeks. The stink of a
garum
factory must have been toxic, yet the liquid that rose to the top of the vats after a few months was clear, golden, fragrant, and salty/sweet. Worcestershire sauce, Gentleman’s Relish, Vegemite, and the Vietnamese fish sauce Nuoc Mam, essential to many Asian dishes, all descend from
garum
.

The Spanish variety, fermented in the blazing Catalan sun, was particularly prized. At one time, it was shipped in thousands of spindle-shaped clay amphorae from ports such as Collioure to every corner of the Roman Empire. And who could say it wouldn’t find a new market today? Part snake oil, part ketchup, part kitchen cleanser; organic, vegetarian, gluten- and GM-free, it was the perfect twenty-first-century product.
A Thousand Household Uses. All Natural Ingredients. No Home Should Be Without It
. But no doubt a hundred European Union regulations existed to make its manufacture illegal, if not criminal.

L
oaded with samples of Desclaux products, and in desperate need of a drink, Chris and I stopped at our hotel to drop off our souvenirs.

“Have you visited the Christmas fair yet?” the desk clerk asked. “You must go to the fair. It’s in the château.”

With nothing much else to do till supper, we climbed into the crumbling pile of the Château Royal. Repeatedly rebuilt and refortified, this horrid pile had known nothing but grief since Wamba the Visigoth laid siege to it in 673. Most recently, it had imprisoned refugees from the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s and opponents of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime during World War II. Today, it’s a training center for commandos. One could see why. In its niches, oubliettes, and staircases, winding, narrow, and unlit, you’d never notice the man in the ski mask until he slit your throat.

Determined not to be dispirited by the air of medieval menace, the locals had drenched the château in Christmas cheer. Former torture chambers and dungeons became brightly lit boutiques where vendors urged us to sample foie gras, gingerbread, honey, jam, and cheese—though nothing, oddly, related to anchovies. Larger chambers had become bars, with barrels instead of tables, and shelves piled with bottles. At last we could taste the elusive local wine—most of it, however, made over the border in Spain. Fortunately, the merchants followed a generous Spanish tradition. None of the bottles clustered on the barrelheads had corks, and the pouring girls could barely wait to refill our glasses.

We reeled out into the ancient courtyard, overlooked by battlements. Adding to the medieval atmosphere, a gaggle of geese milled around, honking hoarsely. Two saddled donkeys drowsed near the wall, ready to give rides to children. Just as a doubtful little boy was being placed on its back, one of these animals defecated explosively. The child wailed in panic as glossy lumps tumbled from under the animal’s tail, an introduction to the equine digestive system that probably scarred him for life.

Geographically we might still be in France, but everything around us smelled of Spain. Though the plains and windmills of La Mancha were hundreds of kilometers south, Don Quixote could well have come clacking into the courtyard on his bony Rocinante with Sancho trailing behind. To the deluded Don, the château would be a palace and its shoppers a crowd of beautiful women and handsome men in opulent court dress. Perhaps that’s how it also looked to the people climbing the narrow stone staircases, peering into brightly lit shops. They were having a wonderful time.