The Devil's Larder

8

IF ANNA WAS allergic to aubergines she hadn’t noticed. She was unhesitant in buying them and cooking them and eating them. On shop display their plumpness and their waxiness were irresistible, though, honestly, the flavour was too tart sometimes. A pinch of sugar helped. But tartness is often the price you have to pay for beauty. She’d learned that lesson from too many of her friends.

Her symptoms were discreet: a little flushing, possibly a touch of wind, and occasionally — following a dinner party or a late meal out — what her mother called a flighty head, but nothing sinister or even inconvenient. She did not suffer from rashes or palpitations. There were no seizures. So she had little opportunity to discover that aubergines did not suit her, that aubergines were treacherous and damaging. They seemed to her too flawless to be harmful, too pleasing to the eye. She liked the aubergine’s affinity with olive oil and garlic, its generous response to mushrooms or tomatoes. It kept good company. She liked its versatility, just as happy to be stuffed as fried, just as tasty in a moussaka or a ratatouille as in a dip or served as fainting priest.

Anna took the usual precautions in her kitchen, of course, cutting off the bruises and the sponge, scooping out the pips and degorging the bitterness in a saltwater soak, before she put the fruit into its saucepan or its dish. She had been told that it was bad luck to slice an aubergine lengthways or peel an aubergine. Good fortune came to those who favoured cubes, or wheels of fruit, rimmed with blue-black tyres of rind. Indeed, she’d lived a life of good fortune and good health, she thought.

She was well into her seventies before her joints seized up. Then even simple tasks — like cubing aubergines — became a challenge and a cause of pain. She had a walking stick for use inside the house. ‘You should give up the toxic foods,’ her younger and exquisite neighbour said, ‘or else you’ll stiffen up completely. Your fault!’

What were ‘the toxic foods’? The neighbour listed all the usual suspects — pickles, citrus fruits, bananas, fat milk and cheese, red meat, green meat, tomatoes, coffee, chocolate, shore fish, cheap wine, rhubarb — and then she raised her knife to stab the little lunchtime stew that Anna, despite her aches and pains, had prepared for both of them. ‘These aubergines. They’re poisonous. They’ll have to go. They’re why your wrists and knees have let you down.’ They left their meal unfinished on their plates.

Anna made adjustments to her life. She never asked her neighbour back for lunch again. The woman was too poisonous, she thought. Despite herself, she cut down on the coffee that she drank. She ate less meat and fewer oranges. But Anna liked her aubergines too much. She was undisciplined. She meant to give them up, but when she saw them — purple, polished — in the shops, she soon forgot about her allergy and all the damage it had caused. She scooped and cubed and wheeled until she had to use her stick out in the street as well. She grew old and frail unnecessarily. Just a little self-restraint, a little less regard for comeliness, may well have kept her younger, quicker, straighter than her years.