The Devil's Larder

3

NO ONE is really sure exactly where the restaurant might be, though everyone’s agreed that the walk to reach it is clandestine and punishing but hardly beautiful. There will be hills and scooping clouds and sulphur pools to menace us. A ridge of little soufrières will belch their heavy, eggy breath across our route. Our eyes will run. Our chests will heave. We’ll sneeze and stumble, semi-blind, with nothing but the occasional blue-marked tree trunk to guide us on our way.

But still we want to risk the walk. The restaurant’s reputation is enough to get us out of bed at dawn. We have to be there by midday if we want to get back safely in the light. The five of us, five men, five strangers united by a single appetite.

We take the little taxi to where the boulder track is beaten to a halt by the river, and then we wade into the water and the trees. We’re wading, too, of course, into the dark side of ourselves, the hungry side that knows no boundaries. The atmosphere is sexual. We’re in the brothel’s waiting room. The menu’s yet to be paraded. We do not speak. We simply wade and hike and climb. We are aroused.

The restaurant is like a thousand restaurants in this part of the world: a wooden lodge with an open veranda, and terraces with smoky views across the canopy towards the coast. There is a dog to greet us, and voices from a radio. An off-track motorbike is leaning against a mesh of logs. But none of the twenty tables, with their cane chairs, are as yet occupied. We are, it seems, the only visitors.

We stand and wait. We cough. We stamp on the veranda floor, but it is not until the Austrian, weary and impatient, claps his hands that anybody comes. A woman and a boy too young to be her son. She is well dressed, with heavy jewellery. We would have liked it better if the waiter were a man.

She has bush meats, as we’d expect, she says. Some snake which she’ll kebab for us, some poacher’s treats like mountain cat, and dried strips of any flesh or glands we’d dare to name. She has, she says, though it’s expensive, parrot meat from a species that is virtually extinct.

What else? To start, hors d’oeuvres, she has soft-bodied spiders, swag beetles, forest roaches, which taste (according to one of our number) ‘like mushrooms with a hint of gorgonzola cheese’. To drink? She offers juice or cans of beer or water flavoured in some unexpected ways.

But we have come — as well she knows — not for these rare dishes but for Curry No. 3 — the menu’s hottest offering, the fetish of the hill. Back in the town, if Curry No. 2 appears on menus, then it’s clearly understood that mountain chicken is on offer, that’s to say it’s curried cuissardes of frog. But we are seeking something more extreme than frog, something prehistoric, hard-core, dangerous, something disallowed where we come from. We mean, at last, to cross the barriers of taste.

So she will bring us Curry No. 3 in her good time. It isn’t done to ask what she will use for meat, although the boy is eyeing us and could be bribed, with cigarettes, to talk. We simply have to take our chances. There might be lizard in the pot or some unlisted insect, in no book. We are prepared for monkey, rat or dog. Offal is a possibility, a rare and testing part we’ve never had before, some esoteric organ stained yellow in the turmeric. Tree shark, perhaps. Iguana eggs. Bat meat. Placenta. Brain. We are bound to contemplate, as well, the child who went astray at the weekend, the old man who has disappeared and is not missed, or the tourist who never made it back to her hotel; the sacrificed, the stillborn and the cadavers, the unaccounted for.

And we are bound to contemplate the short fulfilment we will feel and then the sated discontent that’s bound to follow it, that’s bound to come with us when we, well fed, begin descending to the coast, not in a group, but strung out, five weary penitents, weighed down by our depravities, beset by sulphur clouds, and driven on by little more than stumbling gravity.

How silent the forest is, now that our senses have been dulled by food. How careless we’ve become as we devour the path back to the river and the road. How tired and spent. We are fair game for any passing dogs or snakes. Those flies and wasps are free to dine on us. Those cadavers can rise up from the undergrowth and seize us by the legs if they so wish. For we’re not hungry any more. We found the path up to the restaurant and it was punishing.