proscuitto
There Alexander was, elbows deep in a host of antipasto at a regarded winery in wine country, when he finally came to understand a haunting explanation of his childhood.
It had happened quite serendipitously, actually. He was picking at a yellow beet insalate, a tiny man’s caprese, and nibbling at an arancini which tasted like almond when he helped himself to his first sliver of prosciutto san daniele on the picnic table. It was a golden-brown and delicious day, or more accurately, a real cloudy affair that presumed a need for circular sunglasses and a bomber jacket.
“You know,” Alexander began, “If I had to choose my two favorite cuisines–the two I would have to spend the rest of my life eating–it would have to be Chinese and Italian. Chinese, because I grew up eating Chinese of course, but Italian because it just conceptually seems like Mediterranean Chinese food. The other cuisines are the flings, but Chinese is my mother and Italian is my lover.”
“I didn’t know your girlfriend was Italian,” Robert remarked, refusing to humor him.
Robert sat across from him, the sides of his head shaved and the longer black hair at the top moussed back, and the strands dangling over his forehead had the curl of a limp hand over the edge of a sofa. He was a man bound by his compulsion for the ordinary in accordance to his strict values, and Alexander loved his company, as it forced him to be more absurd for his need for balance.
Alexander was in the midst of explaining a simple recipe for the perfect bite, much like on the back label of a multipack of jelly beans: skewer two pesto-skinned grape tomatoes and one mozzarella with a cube of roasted yellow beet with the fork tines, add a shaving of prosciutto and fennel from the insalate, then eat as one bite. Several crow-like birds, probably crows, were diving into the nearby open barrels lined with garbage bags for disposal bins. Robert sat watching, impressed by their vanishing act as the silhouettes disappeared into the blackness of the bag lining, and Alexander, in his hopeless petulance, made choo-choo noises in an attempt to feed Robert for his own satisfaction.
Alexander was in the midst of explaining to regular ole Robert that fennel was Italian bamboo, all while helping himself to the san daniele in an effort to dilute his legitimacy while doing so.
“You talk this big talk about the fennel but you haven’t even had any yet,” Robert protested on the verge of whining, while helping himself to some. “If anything, it’s the marinade on the salad that’s making it taste like that.”
But Alexander had already moved on, his focus now on the partially prosciutto-filled space in his own mouth. He grasped at it with his tongue, pulling the cured meat between his front teeth as he would have with bubble gum. There was something familiar in the san daniele’s composition which he struggled to place.
“I can maybe see what you’re getting at. With the dressing, it does remind me of those thin bamboo shoots packed in chili oil,” Robert reasoned, shoveling now only fennel into his mouth. “They’re packed with preservatives, so it’s been a little while since I’ve had them, of course, but you could be onto something.”
Silence is often the best negotiator. When you want somebody to talk, saying nothing is usually the best course. Alexander had already moved long past the fennel point he was trying to make, but Robert was ready to plunge into his own mind to make light of this new herbal revelation.
So he did. Meanwhile, Alexander remembered the first time he thought he tasted prosciutto: his parents had bought a pack from the warehouse club, and served it cooked with eggs one morning, insisting it was raw and needed cooking. Of course, there was something suspicious about its placement alongside the salami, pastrami, mortadella, and various salted meats, but it did have a raw looking quality to it he could not ignore.
By then, it had already begun to take shape as a taboo to eat it straight from its package. In his afternoons home alone after school, he would open the fridge door, peer through the clear shelf at its center, and gaze at its raw, undulating, salted form with wide eyes. The individual pieces looked like disks of human flesh, with the fat tracing thinly sliced rounds of meat red from stimulation so white and clean it had to be from a man. He would sometimes put his tongue to it, but only in the moments between the sound of the garage opening and his parents entering the house to necessitate quickly sealing the packaging of the salted meat and fridge like they were his pulled down boxers when his dad would swing open the door of his teenage room without warning. Did he never masturbate when he was younger? He would always wait until they were almost home to level the playing field a smidge and afford his sordid affair a tiny chance of being caught, since he was clearly doing something he shouldn’t be, and needed that chance of capture as a sign to never do it again.
Of course there was never any such sign, because he wouldn’t let there be.
It was another golden-brown and delicious afternoon, except for real. Alex was at the edge of the plump leather sofa in his living room watching an Italian cooking show with a hostess smalltalking with an exceptionally big mouth. Prosciutto lay on her kitchen counter alongside a whole host of ingredients. She was demonstrating how to properly make melon balls, first using an ice cream scooper to hollow out perfect spheres from the hemisphere of cantaloupe before fondling them two at a time onto the baking tray lined in parchment. Alex eyed her thirstily as she made a motion for the prosciutto, pulling a whole slice off the pearly wax paper before peeling it into strips. She carefully grabbed a melon ball with only her fingertips, and delicately wrapped it in the prosciutto strip as he imagined you would a condom, since the sexual education system had failed him at this point. He was probably hard at this point, and she was well aware of it. She dripped reduced balsamic over the mouthful, and let the camera zoom in before plucking it off the tray and popping it into her mouth.
Alex processed just enough of this to sprint to the fridge, thereby killing his erection, and throw open the door to seize the package of prosciutto from the clear shelf. The condiments were ajar, and Alex could still smell the refrigerator coolant as he reached into the half-sealed package, feeling around for the salted meat. He took an entire slice and crammed it into his mouth, nearly vomiting as it peeled back onto his tongue and back of the throat. It felt so sinful in how it seemed to fill his mouth, its texture coarsely sensual and salted like flesh and skin.
Alexander always imagined human flesh to taste like this.
“You know, it really does make a lot of sense. The texture, the mouth feel, the preparation,” Robert finally proclaimed, steeped now in belief like it were a religion. “ Fennel really is Italian bamboo.”