„Yesterday I had fun at an after-work party. I’ll tell you all about it in the relevant details. So much in advance: I was wearing a very short red dress, flared, with a halter top and straps that crossed at the back; no bra; a dress at the interface between youthful sportiness and elegant eroticism. With it Falke stockings and white sneakers. Please tell me how much you would have liked to see me like that. Imagine we had crawled into a corner... I feel your fingers in my central organ. I experience your affection; it gives your empathy a signature. I know that you would like to be dominant, a guy like CC, for whom there are no limits, who decapitates my will, but the way you worship me makes me cum in the most delightful way. And that awakens in me the desire to satisfy you, as if I could win a prize for it.“ C.Z.

Shining Pariah

Stéphane Mallarmé distinguishes between poets who describe people, objects, and scenes, and those drawn to the question qu’est-ce que ça veut dire — what does it mean? The question itself is an act of resistance. Talk about the psychology of things is a by-product of estrangement. In Mallarmé’s era, the artist is in the process of shedding his bourgeois polish. As a flâneur, he becomes a shining pariah. He exiles himself into art and loathes the bourgeoisie, though he remains its creature.

He despises industrialization as the engine of society. He insists on l’art pour l’art. His life proceeds almost untouched by upheaval. Global tremors merely brush against him on the path toward an averted regimentation.

For Nana, it is reason enough to seduce men if they use words she does not know. Anson manages this effortlessly. She would never admit it to him, yet now and then a foreign sound beads on his tongue that does not match the legend surrounding him. She tries to extract the meaning of these verbal jewels from context. The syllables begin to lead lives of their own inside her. They have taste and scent and resonate within Nana’s most sensitive organ. At home she pores, feverish and intent, over folios from the age of the Encyclopedists — survivors of time travel.

Old paper and new vocabulary — often that suffices. With Anson, more becomes possible. Nana sits beside her animal-movement trainer at Café Schneider. In the gentle, fleeting yet constantly returning brushes of their knees, a powerful desire disguises itself. A desire that ennobles Nana. Her features stage a performance of adoring attention. Her dilated pupils tell another story. She is already more aroused than she ever managed to be with last year’s contenders — never meaning not even in the act itself.

Anson’s literary references spill into the present, toward Uwe Timm, whose protagonist in one novel strikes the pose of a libertine. Nana senses that Anson cites Timm only because he wants to see a particular image of woman — one Timm describes — embodied in her: a blend of innocence and intellectual composure coupled with complete abandon. Nana will repay the artful construction of this setting with devotion. She all but plunges into an unexpectedly tender smile, while letting it seem incidental that Anson can lose himself in the sight of her lace-framed breasts.

Lustful Half-Knowledge

An observation, as though cut from life with a scalpel — once, a divine revelation pulled Nana’s friend Lale out of the gutter and delivered her into the kitchen of the legendary Vincent. A dinosaur of his craft, he belongs to a cohort of culinary revolutionaries who paved the way for molecular laboratory gastronomy. In the narrative present, even in Ederthal, the veteran can only be understood historically. Vincent profits from his guests’ desire to worship a hero at the stove.

Their culinary half-knowledge imagines the restaurant kitchen as a predator’s cage lined with claws of every size. In this scenario, Vincent plays the king of beasts. In truth, Lale runs the place. That is not something visible from the outside — it would be bad for business. No one would consider it plausible to place their name on a waiting list for the plating skills of a drug addict who cures herself anew each day through rigor and religion, nor to find Vincent’s prices acceptable. The guest pays for a successful illusion.

Vincent, long since worn down to the core, smokes over his Creuset gear. Sweat floods over his thunderous head like meltwater over stone. Ash and sweat fuse with whatever simmers in the pots.

It is a filth transformed, through a miracle of suggestion, into magic. No guest has ever seen the kitchen itself — the uniform diligence, the iron routine of the brigade, whom Vincent treats at times like slaves and at times like fellow gods.

Mise en place. Let’s roll.