All Over the Map - Hardcover

Fraser, Laura

 
9780307450630: All Over the Map
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307450635 ISBN 13: 9780307450630
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The author of Losing It recounts her arrival in the South Pacific, where she struggles with her life on the go and perceptions of family life before embarking on a search for love in a variety of exotic locations.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAURA FRASER is the author of the bestselling memoir An Italian Affair and Losing It, an investigative look at the weight-loss industry. She is a contributing editor to More magazine, and has written for Gourmet; O, The Oprah Magazine; the New York Times; AFAR; Self; Glamour; Vogue, Elle; Redbook; Tricycle; and more.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One
OAXACA, MEXICO
2001

The winter sun warms the cobblestones that pave the Plaza de Armas in Oaxaca, Mexico. Heavy colonial archways shade the café tables where travelers and people watchers and expatriates come to just sit. They sip their coffees and take in the scene: small boys hawking huge bunches of colorful balloons, musicians in worn suits and perfectly ironed shirts stopping off for a shoe shine, ancient-faced Indians carrying baskets of greens on their heads. Beyond the zócalo, the Sierra Madre mountain range rings the town. There is no hurry here.

The atmosphere is relaxed, but inside I’m buzzing like one of the bees at the fruit vendor’s cart. I glance around the plaza, eyes barely resting on the balconies, the bandstand, the laurel trees, the women with dark braids and bright embroidered tops perched on the edge of the fountain. I check my watch, and it isn’t even time yet.

I’ve come to Oaxaca to mark my fortieth birthday, the passing of the decade during which I probably should have gotten married (again) and had children but did not. It didn’t work out that way. But I am going to celebrate anyway, celebrate the fact that I have the freedom to run off and be in Mexico for my birthday; celebrate with someone—a friend? lover?—for whom all of life is a celebration if you just fi nd the right spot in the sun to sit and take it all in.

I close my eyes to calm myself and sense the faint whiffs of chocolate, coffee, and chiles that perfume the thin air. When I open my eyes, I catch sight of him across the plaza: his soft denim jacket, thick silver bracelet, and chestnut curls that somehow,
still, are not gray. I jump up and wave wildly, and he sees me—everyone sees me—and he drops his old leather suitcase and opens his arms wide.

In a moment, I am pressing my face against his, breathing in his familiar smell of cigars and sea, amazed, as always, to see him again. I met this man, the Professor, by chance over breakfast in a pensione on an Italian island four years ago, right after my husband left me. Over the course of those years, meeting every so often in a different city or island, he helped mend my heart. He has his life and I have mine, but every time we’re together, the scenery seems brighter and the flavors more intense.

“Professore,” I say, breaking our embrace to search his face.

“Laura,” he says, with the soft rolling Italian pronunciation, which could also be Spanish. I like my name, and maybe myself, better in a Latin country. It’s softer.

The Professor sits at the café, orders coffee, and moves his chair close, positioning his face in the sun. He squeezes my hand.

“Bel posto,” he says. Beautiful place.

“Incantado,” I say, not sure, as often happens, if I am speaking Italian or Spanish. Enchanted.

“La bella vita continua,” he says.

He tells me that I look as good as ever, and I say he looks even better, something has changed. He seems energetic and expansive for his normally cool Parisian aesthetics professor self, less pale. He is brimming with a secret joy.

By the time we walk several blocks back to our hotel, opening the door onto a promiscuous jungle of a garden, he has spilled the whole story. He finally split up with the wife who didn’t love him, who had been in love with someone else for years. And he’s found an exciting new relationship.

We sit at a colorful little tile table on the patio outside our room, and he tells me everything. I’ve known there have been other women between our rendezvous, and there have been other men for me, too. But I’m not sure I want to hear all this. I don’t
care to know, for instance, that she is Eastern European and a professor herself and teaches comparative literature. Even less that she probably spends more on her lingerie than her clothes. While he tells his story I stare at a banana tree, counting the leaves from the bottom, struggling to be able to say, by the time I reach the clear sky above, that I am happy for him instead of sorry for myself. It’s not as if I’d ever imagined that I would end up in Paris with the Professor. Well, not very often. I did start taking French.

“I’m happy for you,” I say finally, and I’m glad, at least, to see that adds to his joy. I’m trying not to think about how ironic it is that it is the Professor—the rogue, the adventurer, the Don Juan—who is happy to be settling down, while I, the one who has
wanted a steady partner, a companion, a house and family, am sharing a hotel room with yet another man who likes me a lot and is not in love with me. If he says we can always be friends, I will lose it completely.

I turn the key to our whitewashed room, and he flops down on the carved wooden bed. I lie next to him, fi ghting tears, and he caresses my cheek. Then he strokes the small of my back.

I roll away and sit up. “Professor,” I finally say, “it’s too hard for me to be friends who tell each other everything about their love lives and still be lovers.”

“Not for me,” he says, sexy as ever.

I push his hand away and sigh. “Let’s go eat.”

I chose Oaxaca for my birthday and convinced the Professor to join me (before this new romance of his) because I happened across a book by Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun, in which each essay is devoted to one of the senses. Of all the cities in the
world where Calvino had dined—and he was Italian, mind you—for him Oaxaca embodied the ultimate fulfi llment of the sense of taste. Oaxacan cuisine, he wrote, mixes a cornucopia of native vegetables with spices and recipes brought over by the Spanish. Over the centuries, those cuisines were mingled, enhanced, and perfected by cloistered nuns (for whom cooking was one of the few earthly indulgences). Calvino called Oaxacan food “an elaborate and bold cuisine” with fl avor notes that vibrate
against one another in harmonies and dissonances to “a point of no return, an absolute possession exercised on the receptivity of all the senses.”

Ah, yes. For now, in Oaxaca, with the Professor, the food will have to do all the stirring of the senses.

And so we eat. We venture to a modest place near the hotel where a stout woman does wonders in the tiny kitchen. We try dishes that are familiar by name but taste unlike any Mexican food I’ve ever eaten. The guacamole is fresher, the tortillas sweeter and crisper. The dark sauce on the enchiladas and chiles rellenos seem
concocted from an ancient, mysterious alchemy. For the French Professor, who has never set foot in this country before and has tried Mexican food only secondhand in San Francisco when he visited me there, every taste is new.

For the next few days, we explore Oaxaca’s cuisine, trying moles in different colors each day—from Amarillo, with tomatillos and chiles, to a black, chocolaty mole negro. Each sauce requires days to prepare, and each bite is a layered, earthy, mouth-warming experience. The Professor sighs, watching me in anticipation of the pleasure of my bite, and then I sigh with him, adding the layers and spices of our history and passion to each complicated mouthful.

Between meals, we visit Monte Alban, the Zapotec ruins, climbing to the top of the pyramids to take in the wide sky and view of the town below. You can see why Hernán Cortés, who was offered anywhere in Mexico for himself after his conquest, chose the Oaxaca Valley. Then we walk all the way back to town to find Aztec soup and chicken tamales wrapped in banana leaves. We...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307450635
ISBN 13 
9780307450630
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
271
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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