French Revolutions

options, and if I didn’t eat a great
deal of food very soon parts of my body would start to fall off. By the time
the bullied-looking waitress appeared, I had downed my carafe of rosé almost in
one; she tentatively raised a corner of the napkin as if concerned it might
conceal a dying seagull, and recoiled as if it had when the stench hit her.
‘Les anchois?’ she gagged. ‘The anchovies,’ I wanly concurred.
    In bad English and worse French we
agreed upon a replacement Margherita, but no sooner had she disappeared through
the kitchen doors with the offending pizza at arm’s length than out burst the
chef. It was not a good time to notice his uncanny resemblance to the more
experienced of the two 1950s Cuban boxers in that Bacardi ad.
    His face gave away nothing, but as he
approached my table I noticed that from the fat, oily fingers of his left hand
dangled a fat, oily anchovy the colour of the outside of a cold hardboiled egg
yolk. When he was standing far too close, the anchovy passed from left hand to
right, and thence towards my face.
    ‘Anchois!’ he barked abruptly, before
slowly licking each of his oiled left fingers with pornographic relish. I found
myself unavoidably recalling the night in Transylvania’s Hotel Dracula when,
along one of the many dark corridors, Birna and I chanced upon the cook and two
waiters exacting intricate physical retribution upon a Bulgarian lorry driver
we had earlier overheard muttering a protest about his starter, which, like
ours, consisted of a single beige vegetable apparently preserved in carbonated
Bovril.
    Such professional pride is of course
what makes eating out in most European countries such an involving experience,
or so I failed to philosophise as the pizza chef’s pallid hostage began
dripping on to my trousers.
    ‘You no ’ave anchois in Angleterre?’
he said, his smelly face so close to mine I could see the enormous pores on his
nose expanding as the surrounding features broadened into the sort of lunatic
smile that precedes the righting of gangland wrongs.
    Look, you hideous gargoyle, I’ve got
half an arsing cupboard of cock-buttocked anchovies at home, or at least I did
have until Birna took the kids away for a week and I ended up living off the
contents of all the obscure tins emptied on to Ryvita.
    ‘Oui,’ I said, stoutly refusing to
concede any linguistic quarter.
    He nodded slowly, then, bunching his
fist around the hostage anchovy, began to pace the suddenly dungeon-like
courtyard. There was an ancient, tack-studded door on one side propped shut
with a broom and something started growling behind it.
    ‘Five year I make pizza,’ he blurted
to the flagstones halfway through his second lap. ‘Five year, and nobody say
zis.’ On his way back to the kitchen he stopped beside me, crammed the anchovy
pulp into his glistening chops and wiped both hands on my tablecloth.
    By the time the waitress appeared
with a Margherita in her hands and a desperate beam on her face, I had already
sketched out contingency plans for the chef’s return. Pepper in the eyes, cruet
set in the teeth — and if all else failed, levelling up the playing field by
kicking over that broom to free the beast.
    I knew of course that the substitute
dish would have been imaginatively adulterated, but seven breadsticks hadn’t
quite bridged my 130-kilometre hunger-gap, and so, pasty-faced with disgust, I
slowly ingested it all. Bleak and tired, I was preparing to pay the waitress
when I noticed, with a nauseating jolt of distress, that both pizzas had made
their way on to the bill. It is difficult to express the almost uncontrollable
anguish this discovery caused me. In the red corner, fear and inertia; in the
blue corner, justice and self-respect. The blues won after extra time.
    Struggling to conjure up the cocksure
hauteur that had propelled me into le Blanc, I made my way to the till,
encouraged to note that the main restaurant was now heavily populated. The
waitress appeared with an I-thought-this-might-happen look, and voicelessly
veered off to the kitchen. The chef started up as soon as he came out of the
swing doors. ‘Something bad, you doan pay. You no like something, you pay.’
    It all got shrill very quickly. Still
determined to keep the linguistic high ground, in an aggrieved adolescent
quaver I pointed out in French that his pizza was both bad and naughty; he
replied in English that I did not understand how an anchois is. I had counted
out the exact