Part 2—The Coquillages
I left the café, strolled up the boulevard, took a table in a seafood restaurant and ordered mussels, a green salad and a bottle of Rhone red. As I finished Camus’ chapter on nihilism through history, the waiter returned and displayed my wine. I read the label, nodded and watched him extract the cork. I gave it a cursory glance, twirled and sniffed the sample he poured, tilted the glass to examine the opacity, twirled it again to watch the tracks run down the far side, allowed some onto my tongue, rolled it from the front of my mouth to the rear, stared into the middle distance for a count of three, all more for the waiter’s benefit than my own, (I can’t always distinguish table wine from Origin Controlled) and nodded for him to fill my glass.
A man, his wife and a friend of the wife’s took a table at the far end of the restaurant, the husband and wife facing me, the friend with her back to me. The waiter served them glasses of Lillet and a ration of sea snails as they consulted with him and ordered. The moment he left, the two women leaned toward one another and plunged into conversation, speaking quickly in low voices. The husband drank Lillet and picked snails from striped shells, taking no more part in their conversation than they in his snails.
Using an empty shell for the mussels, my fingers for the frites, I sipped wine and watched the husband. The waiter brought their entrees and a bottle of rose’. The wife’s friend blocked my view of what the women were eating but the husband had ordered grilled sardines. He peeled foil off a plastic cup, carefully applied butter to a section of bread with his fish knife, laid it on the edge of his plate, skillfully beheaded, deboned and de-finned the first of two six-inch-long sardines with his fork and fish knife. Taking a bite of buttered bread, he loaded a forkful of sardine into his mouth, chewed them well and repeated the process—peeling plastic cup after plastic cup, first the butter, next the bread, then more sardine, loading them in and ramming them home systematically as the Old Guard loaded their muskets at Marengo.
How did he taste the sardines? Or was he masking their taste? Then, why order them? Did they lower cholesterol? No, he was eating all that butter. Perhaps he wasn’t French? In England they skewer meat, three peas, one chip and a bit of sun-dried tomato onto a fork and gobble it down. But he spoke French. Was he Alsatian?
In America we serve sardines skinned and deboned. It saves some work by the diner, but at the same time it eliminates development of any expertise in the use of the fish knife. Eventually, it will eliminate the fish knife. Look at General Motors.
The waiter cleared their table, returned with plates of broiled fish, which he set before the two women, went back to the kitchen and returned, walking as if carrying a birthday cake burning forty candles. He held a meter-tall silvered tower with five separate levels out before him. As he passed, I recognized six varieties of crustacean arrayed on chipped ice and adorned with yellow wedges of lemon and green wedges of lime—oysters, mussels, scallops, whelks, langoustines and clams. Each was paired with its own sauce and its own special eating implement. Afterwards, I checked the menu outside. It was called a Coquillages. They started at sixty-five euros—about a hundred clams.
At the top, a dozen Breton oysters lay flat on their half shells surrounded by six Spanish mussels standing on end. The husband buttered a segment of bread, laid it on his plate, raised the first oyster from its bed of ice and with expert touches of his oyster fork freed it from its shell. A squeeze of lemon, a dip of sauce from a metal server at the base of the tower, and priming the way with buttered bread, he transferred the oyster into his mouth, chewed, raised the shell, drained the remaining liquid, placed it on a discard plate and sipped rose’. He lifted a second oyster from its bed of ice, then a third and fourth until all were gone.
Next, he whipped through the Spanish mussels until the top tier held only chipped ice, a single wedge of lemon and three of lime. He descended a tier to the Circle of the Scallops. Using a different fork, different sauce and squeezes of lime instead of lemon, he ate the scallops and moved down to the Circle of the Whelks. Here he picked up a fifty-centimeter-long two-tined fork designed for reaching into and curetting narrow crevices. Using that and a different sauce, he expertly laid bare the Circle of the Whelks.
The next tier down was the Circle of the Langoustines. Bare handed, he decapitated each with a twist of the wrist, sucked it dry and discarded the head. He then loosened each of the shells, starting at the neck and squeezing his way to the tail with deft touches of his thumb and first two fingers. After cracking it all its length, he tugged free the meat in a single flawless piece, dipped it into a silvered server of mayonnaise and consumed it in two equal bites, each preceded with a neatly buttered piece of bread, each followed by a sip of rose’ wine.
From the highest tier to the lowest, he stripped the tower bare removing each crustacean from its circle with the appropriate implement, dressing it with the appropriate sauce and accompanying it on its way with meticulously buttered segments of bread and sips of rose’ wine. Then he pushed the plates before him toward the vacant setting across the table and joined the conversation of his wife and her friend, speaking precisely and clearly, with decisive gestures of the hands. The women leaned back from one another and stopped speaking. Turning toward the husband, they listened attentively, frequently nodding their heads.
At a table to the husband’s left, a father and two sons were vainly seeking to gain the attention of their waitress. The father shook his head and snorted; the sons rolled their eyes and sighed in despair. There was some crisis, but she kept rushing past bearing towers of crustaceans. Their gestures grew more frantic. The older son was nineteen or twenty. He was wearing a short-sleeved rugby shirt, though judging from the flabbiness of his pale white arms, he participated only in games in which running and body contact were prohibited. They half-stood in their seats. No use. They signaled with their napkins. She nodded and rushed past again. Unbelievable! They grunted, they fumed, they expelled audible bursts of air between their lips. Suddenly, she was standing at their table, bending toward them, teetering on her toes to show eagerness to be of service.
Their bottle of Badiot water was empty. The son in the rugby shirt raised his flabby arm to hold the evidence high. The waitress threw up her hands. She streamed apologies. There was no excuse! She snatched the empty bottle and fled. In seconds she was back with a fresh bottle. She opened it and poured Badiot round the table. Was there anything more that they desired? Impatiently, they shook their heads. They’d lost enough time already and were eager to get back to business. Their frantic gestures subsided, and their table grew tranquil as they returned to eating their dinner.
I closed my Camus. There was no place for Sisyphus in Paris. How find time for suicide or moral revolt when there were twelve separate varieties of crustacean, each requiring its own appropriate implement, its own particular sauce? Parisians can’t worry themselves over the Absurd. They leave all that to the Existentialists.
Of course in America, we do the same, perhaps with less flair. We smother the Absurd and live by bending the legs of Camus’ triangle, not quite like Lincoln, but in compromises between the life we wish to live and that we accept living. And why trouble ourselves over the meaning of life? Didn’t Freud say that one does that only when one’s Badiot glass is empty?
Herb L.
oldtimewriter.com