Page 7 of The Last Postcard

‘You think they’ll want you after that?’ She looked at me, still revolted. ‘What use do I have for a thing like you anyway? Your youth is the only thing of value, and if I can’t sell that …’ She turned towards the door. ‘Ifrahim, make sure she—’

‘Camila.’

For all my pain and terror and sickness, I remember being stunned by that. I had never heard anyone call Morales by her first name. She stopped moving. I couldn’t see her face from where I stood, but I could tell her eyes were fixed on Ifrahim’s.

‘I’ll use her in the kitchen,’ he said, softly, the way he always spoke. ‘God knows I could do with the help.’ He winced and shifted his chest, and I knew his heart was paining him. Morales knew it too, because I saw her lower her head a fraction, as if to look through his ribs. ‘If she doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw her out myself.’

I don’t know what passed between them in that silence. I could only see Ifrahim’s face, his brown eyes betraying nothing as he held Morales’ gaze.

She never agreed. Never disagreed either, just turned her head and walked from the room.

It was Ifrahim’s heart that caused him to speak for me that day, I am sure of it. In the kitchen, he helped me clean my face and gave me a lump of precious ice from the box to soothe my tongue, and let me sleep in front of the stove, so that I wouldn’t have to tread the corridors of the inn, where the men might still be at their business.

The next morning, early, he set me to chopping onions and peeling potatoes, while he went to the plaza to argue for meat. Vegetable tears stung my eyes as I worked, and I wished that they were tears of love, so I could give them to Ifrahim.

That day, we made tortilla. We used eggs from the market and oil from the huge canister by the stove and my own cut onions and potatoes. And when I saw the gusto with which the guests greeted those plates of tortilla, when I saw them cramming it down with bread and beer, a strange realization crept into my mind.

Without us, those people would have gone hungry. Ifrahim and I kept them in their seats; we held them there spellbound with only a few humble ingredients. It was a kind of magic – slender but potent – and I understood for the first time that Ifrahim lived by it. Being a cook gave him authority; he wasn’t like the men upstairs, with their clean shirts and their deep pockets, but he had a control they didn’t, and he could wield it in ways they never would have imagined.

Later, my hands cracked from scrubbing soap and blistered from the kitchen knife, I moved my things out of the room I had shared with Elena. I can’t say exactly what made me do it, only the knowledge that something had shifted for us both. She did not look at me while I collected my few clothes, only sat on the edge of the bed, holding the hem of a beautiful white lace mantilla between her fingers. I supposed it was a gift from the señor with the cigar. The box of Turkish Delight was there too, open beside her. They were untouched save for one, chewed and glistening, spat out amongst the others.

‘Take them away,’ she said, when she saw me looking, ‘I don’t want them.’

I didn’t want them either but I picked them up, chewed lump and all. I thought about giving them to Ifrahim, in thanks, but I knew it wouldn’t be right. I burned them instead, in their pretty box, until the whole kitchen smelled of animal bones and roses.

I slept in the kitchen every night after that, on an ancient truckle bed wedged next to the stove. On colder nights, I’d wake to find the inn’s cats tailoring themselves to my body, beneath my arms, against my neck, in the gap between my knees, purring for warmth. I didn’t mind them. They had fleas, but they kept the rats away. With them, and Ifrahim in his storeroom near by, I felt safe.

I told him that one night, a few weeks after he’d spoken for me. We had finished our labours in the kitchen, the inn gates were closed, and everyone else had moved upstairs, to sleep or entertain. He’d nodded slowly.

‘There’s safety here,’ he agreed. ‘Cooking saved my life.’ He took a drag on his pipe then, and looked at me through the stove light. ‘Feed them, Ale,’ he said softly. ‘Feed them well and they will want you, they will need you. Make them forget you’re a girl and think of you instead as a kitchen-thing, a duende, a stove-spirit. Then, they will want you for your usefulness, and leave you be.’

We looked at each other in the silence. The memory of Morales’ words hung between us, and I shifted, hunching further beneath the kitchen smock, willing my growing breasts to remain flat, to stay away. In that moment I wished I was Ifrahim’s son; I wished we truly were kitchen-spirits, untouchable and free. But I wasn’t, and we weren’t. Ifrahim closed his eyes, and I could tell he too was thinking about his body, his heart made of guts. He was thinking about the day it would unravel, and take his life with it.

But before that day, he taught me everything he could. He taught me how to make a batter and coat chunks of aubergine and drop them into hot oil. I got burns from that – my forearms and hands speckled with red marks – but it was worth it. Because when the platters went out, drizzled with molasses, I smiled to see people gobbling the morsels, burning their tongues and saying hoh hoh and reaching for their wine. I had done that. I had burned them, as surely as if I’d walked up and singed their tongues with a coal. The thought made me almost savage with delight.

I didn’t realize it fully at the time, but by teaching me to cook, Ifrahim was also teaching me how to live, how to carve a space for myself in a world that didn’t want me. He taught me how to bewitch people; how to change the course of their thoughts – if only for an evening. Our ingredients were humble; salt and fruit, meat and oil and wine. But Ifrahim could spin them into a hundred different pleasing shapes.

‘Watch them close, and they will tell you what they want, Ale,’ he whispered, as we stood together at the kitchen door, watching a hard-faced English merchant in the courtyard, who sweated and fidgeted in his pressed suit, eyeing the girls with a nervous scowl. ‘They won’t even know they’re doing it, but watch them and they’ll spill all.’ He smiled down at me. ‘We’ll be their confessors.’

That was the day he taught me to make sangria; a drink as old and false as rouge. He set me to chopping leftover fruit, the peaches that had burst from their skins at the market, slices of bitter orange and shrivelled grapes that no one wanted. I watched as he glugged Málaga over the lot, so that the fruit began to drink, sucking the sweet wine into withered flesh until it seemed full and luscious once more.

‘Now, how much brandy?’ he asked, nodding at the stern Englishman who sat in the courtyard, fretfully breaking toothpicks into shards.

‘A cup,’ I said slowly. ‘No, two cups.’

Ifrahim smiled. ‘For a fish as cold as that, I believe we will need three.’

The brandy was followed by red wine – cheap stuff from the cooking cask that would leave a headache, but no matter – and seltzer from the glass dispenser. Finally, Ifrahim stirred in his secret: a pinch of pepper, ‘to warm the heart’.

That jug of drink turned the Englishman’s sour face pink, made his narrowed eyes big and bright. It undid his cravat and sent his hat flying across the dusty ground of the inn. It sent him upstairs with a girl on one arm and a second jug clutched to his chest. Most importantly, that drink reached into his pocket and emptied his wallet a note at a time with its sticky, red fingers.

All of Ifrahim’s lessons were like that, two-faced as a conjuror’s coin. He taught me how to gild bad fish with pimentón, how to hammer horsemeat and soak it in wine until the stallion-loving bastards who slummed it at the inn would have made their own mothers swear it was beef. He taught me how to pilfer more than I paid for at the market, how to protest my innocence if I was ever caught being light-fingered and swear that it was a mistake, that it was only ‘the sun in my eyes’.

Four years of those lessons. Milk puddings and how to cheat at Nap. Fish ‘à la française’ and how to tell a person’s wealth by what they ordered to drink.

‘Watch what comes out of their mouths, as well as what goes in,’ he told me, ‘and you will know them for what they are.’

One January day, Ifrahim’s heart finally came loose, and he died. It left me terrified; I was seventeen, and that alone would surely be enough to make Morales rethink her decision – to give me the choice once more of a room upstairs, or the road.