In the Country of Last Things

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alimentopia.company“I stole food from an old man who tried to rob me one night in the atrium of the old Hypnotists Theatre - snatched the porridge right out of his hand and didn’t even feel sorry about it. I had no friends, no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with.”
alimentopia.company“I stole food from an old man who tried to rob me one night in the atrium of the old Hypnotists Theatre - snatched the porridge right out of his hand and didn’t even feel sorry about it. I had no friends, no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with.”
alimentopia.company“From now on, there will be a roof over your head and food to eat.”
alimentopia.company“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.company“I am not just talking about his grumbling. nor the constant little digs he would make about how much money I earned or the food I brought home for our meals.”
alimentopia.company“That morning was particularly grueling for her, and as she slowly went about the job of gathering herself together, I puttered around the apartment as I usually did, trying to act as though nothing had happened: boiling water, slicing bread, setting the table — just sticking to the normal routine. On most mornings, Ferdinand went on sleeping until the last possible moment, rarely budging until he could smell the porridge cooking on the stove (...) Isabel and I had both completed our various preparations and were ready to sit down to breakfast. Ordinarily, one of us would have roused Ferdinand by then, but on this morning of mornings neither one of us said a word. (...)’Don’t you think we should wake up Ferdinand? You know how he gets when we start without him. We don’t want him to think we're cheating him out of his share. (...) "It's just that I was enjoying this moment of companionship. We so rarely get to be alone anymore.””
alimentopia.company“Three days later, they gave me a send-off party with champagne and cigars. Bogat spoke a toast, and everyone drank to my health, shook my hand, slapped me on the back. I felt like a guest at my own funeral.”
alimentopia.company“When the period of troubles began, Dr. Woburn was among the first to call attention to the growing numbers of homeless people. Because he was a respected doctor from an important family, his statements were given a good deal of publicity, and it soon became fashionable in wealthy circles to support his cause. There were fund-raising dinners, charity dances, and other society functions, and ultimately a number of buildings around the city were converted into shelters.”
alimentopia.company“Most were grateful. of course, most appreciated what was being done for them, but there were many others who had a difficult time of it. Disputes among residents were common, and it seemed that just about anything could set them off: the way someone ate his food or picked his nose, the opinion of this one as opposed to that one, the way someone coughed or snored while everyone else was trying to sleep—all the petty squabbles that occur when people are suddenly thrown together under one roof”
alimentopia.company“After completing our business with the Resurrection Agents, we often went back [to Boris’s apartment] for a glass of tea. Boris was very fond of tea, and he usually served some kind of pastry to go along with it-scandalous treats from the House of Cakes on Windsor Boulevard: cream puffs, cinnamon buns, chocolate eclairs, all bought at horrific expense. Boris could not resist these minor indulgences, however, and he savored them slowly, his chewing accompanied by a faint musical rumbling in his throat, a steady undercurrent of sound that fell somewhere between laughter and a prolonged sigh. I took pleasure in these teas as well, but less for the food than for Boris’s insistence on sharing it with me. My young widow friend is too wan, he would say. We must put more flesh on her bones, bring the bloom back to her cheeks, the bloom in the eyes of Miss Anna Blume herself. (...) After slicking back the strands of his thinning hair and dousing his neck with cologne, he would come striding out into the cramped and dusty living room to prepare the tea. (...) Sometimes, he would pick out a couple of [his hats] for us to wear while we were having our tea. (...) If we both wore them while we drank our tea, then we were bound to have more intelligent and stimulating conversations.”
alimentopia.company“I don't go out much anymore. Only when my tum comes to do the shopping. but even then Sam usually volunteers to take my place. (...) I continue to do most of the cooking, but after preparing meals for twenty or thirty people at a time, cooking for four is almost nothing. We don’t eat much in any case. Enough to stifle the pangs, but hardly more than that. We're trying to hoard our money for the trip and mustn't depart from this regime.”
alimentopia.company“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, Ihave to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.consequences“This is how I live, her letter continued. I don’t eat much. Just enough to keep me going from step to step, and no more. At times my weakness is so great, I feel the next step will never come. But I manage. In spite of the lapses, I keep myself going. ‘You should see how well I manage.”
alimentopia.consequences“I eat as little as I can.”
alimentopia.consequences“Tf not for my hunger, I wouldn't be able to go on.”
alimentopia.consequences“I eat as little as I can.”
alimentopia.consequences“There are people so thin, she wrote, they are sometimes blown away. The winds in the city are ferocious (...) It’s not uncommon to see the thinnest people moving about in twos and threes, sometimes whole families, bound together by ropes and chains, to ballast one another against the blast. Others give up trying to go out altogether, bugging to the doorways and alcoves, until even the fairest sky seems a threat. Better to wait quietly in their comer, they think, than to be dashed against the stones.”
alimentopia.consequences“It is also possible to become so good at not eating that eventually you can eat nothing at all.”
alimentopia.consequences“It is even worse for the ones who fight their hunger. Thinking about food too much can only lead to trouble. These are the ones who are obsessed, who refuse to give in to the facts. They prowl the streets at all hours, scavenging for morsels, taking enormous risks for even the smallest crumb. No matter how much they are able to find, it will never be enough. They eat without ever filling themselves, tearing into their food with animal haste, their bony fingers picking their quivering jaws never shut. Most of it dribbles down their chins, and what they manage to swallow, they usually throw up again in a few minutes. It is a slow death, as if food were a fire, a madness, buming them up from within. They think they are eating to stay alive, but in the end they are the ones who are eaten.”
alimentopia.consequences“As it turns out, food is a complicated business, and unless you learn to accept what is given to you, you will never be at peace with yourself. Shortages are frequent, and a food that has given you pleasure one day will more than likely be gone the next. “
alimentopia.consequences“The municipal markets are probably the safest, most reliable places to shop, but the prices are high and the selections paltry. One day there will be nothing but radishes, another day nothing but stale chocolate cake. To change your diet so often and so drastically can be very hard on the stomach. But the municipal markets have the advantage of being guarded by the police, and at least you know that what you buy there will wind up in your own stomach and not someone else’s. Food theft is so common in the streets that itis not even considered a crime anymore. On top of that, the municipal markets are the only legally sanctioned form of food distribution.”
alimentopia.consequences“There are many private food sellers around the city. but their goods can be confiscated at any time. Even those who can afford to pay the police bribes necessary to stay in business still face the constant threat of attacks from thieves. Thieves also plague the customers of the private markets, and it has been statistically proven that one out of every two purchases leads to a robbery. It hardly seems worth it, I think, to risk so much for the fleeting joy of an orange or the taste of boiled ham. But the people are insatiable: hunger is a curse that comes every day, and the stomach is a bottomless pit, a hole as big as the world. The private sellers, therefore, do a good business, in spite on the obstacles, picking up from one place and going to another, constantly on the move, appearing for an hour or two somewhere and then vanishing out of sight. One word of warning, however. If you must have the foods from the private markets, then be sure to avoid the renegade grocers, for fraud is rampant, and there are many people who will sell anything just to tun a profit: eggs and oranges filled with sawdust, bottles of piss pretending to be beer.”
alimentopia.consequences"If you want to get through [the barricades], you must give the guards whatever they demand. Sometimes it is money; sometimes it is food; sometimes it is sex."
alimentopia.consequences“there are always new people to replace the ones who have vanished. They pour in from the country and the outlying towns, dragging carts piled high with their belongings, sputtering in with broken-down cars, all of them hungry, all of them homeless.”
alimentopia.consequences“these newcomers are easy victims. (...) [Some] lay out their savings to buy food that tums out to be painted cardboard.”
alimentopia.consequences“Without fuss or prelude they break off from what they are doing, sit down, and talk about the desires that have been dwelling up inside them. Food, of course, is one of the favorite subjects. Often you will overhear a group of people describing a meal in meticulous detail, beginning with the soups and appetizers and slowly working their way to dessert, dwelling on each savor and spice, on all the various aromas and flavors, concentrating now on the method of preparation, now on the effect of the food itself, from the first twinge of taste on the tongue to the gradually expanding sense of peace as the food travels down the throat and arrives in the belly. These conversations sometimes go on for hours, and they have a highly rigorous protocol. You must never laugh, for example, and you must never allow you hunger to get the better of you. No outbursts, no unpremeditated sighs. That would lead to tears, and nothing spoils a food conversation more quickly than tears.”
alimentopia.consequences“If the words can consume you, you will be able to forget your present hunger and enter what people call the “arena of the sustaining nimbus.” There are even those who say there is nutritional value in these food talks - given the proper concentration and an equal desire to believe in the words among those taking part.”
alimentopia.consequences“you [as a member of the Runners] must go through a series of difficult initiations: holding your breath under water, fasting (...) Once you have been accepted, you must, submit to the code of the group. This involves (...) a gradually reduced intake of food.”
alimentopia.consequences“Then there ts the Pleasure Cruise, which can go on for as long as two weeks. The customers are treated to an opulent life, catered to in a manner that rivals the splendor of the old luxury hotels. There are elaborate meals, wines (...) This runs into quite a bit of money, but for some people the chance to live the good life, even for a short while, is an irresistible temptation.”
alimentopia.consequences“there are no politics in the city as such. The people are too hungry, too distracted, too much at odds with each other for that."
alimentopia.consequences“In the city, the best approach is to believe only what your own eyes tell you. But not even that is infallible. For few things are ever what they seem to be (...) For it is one thing to do this when the object before your eyes is a pencil, say, or a crust of bread. But what happens when you find yourself looking at a dead child (...) lying in the street...”
alimentopia.consequences“For the limbs and torso, whole [paper] sheets wrapped around a number of loosely fitting knots is often the best procedure. (...) The whole thing gives you a puffy, padded look, which has the cosmetic advantage of disguising thinness. For those who are concemed about keeping up appearances, the “paper meal”, as it is called, serves as a kind of face-saving technique. People literally starving to death, with caved-in stomachs and limbs like sticks walk around trying to look as though they weigh two ‘or three thousand pounds. No one is ever fooled by this disguise (..) but perhaps that isnot the real point. What they seem to be saying is that they know what has happened to them and they are ashamed of it. (...) They turn themselves into grotesque parodies of the prosperous and well-fed...”
alimentopia.consequences“Since the work brings in so little, you rarely have a chance to put anything aside — and if you do, that usvally means you are depriving yourself of something essential: food, for example, without which you will not have the strength to do the work necessary to earn the money to buy the cart.”
alimentopia.consequences“I stole food from an old man who tried to rob me one night in the atrium of the old Hypnotists Theatre - snatched the porridge right out of his hand and didn’t even feel sorry about it. I had no friends, no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with.”
alimentopia.consequences“I stole food from an old man who tried to rob me one night in the atrium of the old Hypnotists Theatre - snatched the porridge right out of his hand and didn’t even feel sorry about it. I had no friends, no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with.”
alimentopia.consequences“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.consequences“Her throat finally stopped working altogether, and because of that she could no longer swallow. From then on, solid food was out of the question, but eventually even water became impossible for her to get down. I was reduced to putting a few drops of moisture on her lips to prevent her mouth from drying up, but we both knew that it was only a matter of time now, since she was literally starving to death, wasting away for lack of any nourishment. It was a remarkable thing, but once I even thought that Isabel was smiling at me, right there at the end, as I sat beside her dabbing water ‘on her lips. (...) She had been so apologetic about getting sick, so ashamed at having to rely on me for everything, but the fact was that I needed her just as much as she needed me. What happened then, right after the smile, if it was a smile, was that Isabel began to choke on her own saliva. She just couldn’t get it down anymore, and though Tried to clean out her mouth with my fingers, too much of it was sliding back down her throat, and soon there was no more air left for her to breathe.”
alimentopia.consequences“Every tree in the city was chopped down during the winter and burned for fuel. Every domestic animal disappeared; every bird was shot. Food shortages became so drastic that construction of the sea wall was suspended—just six months after it had begun—so that all available policemen could be used to guard the shipments of produce to the municipal markets. Even so, there were a number of food riots, which led to more deaths, more injuries, more disasters. No one knows how many people died during the winter, but I have heard estimates as high as one-third to one-fourth of the population.”
alimentopia.consequences““My friend Isabel believed in God,” I continued. “She’s dead, too. I sold her Bible for seven glots to Mr. Gambino, the Resurrection Agent. That was a terrible thing to do, wasn't it?” “Not necessarily. There are more important things than books, after all. Food comes before prayers.”
alimentopia.consequences“The problem was that his money was running low, and the odds seemed to have tumed against him. He couldn’t afford to do the interviews anymore, and with his funds at such a dangerous ebb, he was now eating only every other day. That made things even worse, of course. The strength was being sapped out of him, and there were times when he became so dizzy that he no longer saw the words he was writing. Sometimes, he said, he would fall asleep at his desk without even knowing it.”
alimentopia.consequences“We often talked about home then, summoning up as many memories as we could, bringing back the smallest, most specific images in a kind of languorous incantation—the maple trees along Miro Avenue in October, the Roman numeral clocks in the public school classrooms, the green dragon light fixture in the Chinese restaurant across from the university. We were able to share the flavor of these things, to relive the myriad incidentals of a world we had both known since childhood, and it helped to keep our spirits up, I think, helped to make us believe that some day we would be able to retum to all that.”
alimentopia.consequences“Given Sam's involvement with the pregnancy, this cold alarmed him to the point of hysteria. He dropped everything to take care of me, hovering around the bed like a demented nurse, throwing away money on extravagant items like tea and canned soups. (...) He would do all the shopping and errands himself. (...)"Just because I'm pregnant, I don’t want to be treated like an invalid,” I said.”
alimentopia.consequences“For right then, in the tiny interval that elapsed before he shut the door again, I was able to see clearly into the other room, and there was no mistaking what I saw in there: three or four human bodies hanging naked from meat-hooks, and another man with a hatchet leaning over a table and lopping off the limbs of another corpse. There had been rumors circulating in the library that human slaughterhouses now existed, but I hadn’t believed them.”
alimentopia.consequences“The remarkable thing was how quickly everyone adapted to the material comforts that were offered—the beds and showers, the good food and clean clothes, the chance to do nothing. After two or three days at Wobum House, men and women who had been eating out of garbage cans could sit down to a large spread at an attractively set table with all the aplomb and composure of fat, middle-class burghers. Perhaps that is not as strange as it seems. We all take things for granted, and when it comes to such basic things as food and shelter, things that are probably ours by natural right, then it doesn’t take long for us to think of them as an integral part of ourselves. It is only when we lose them that we ever notice the things we had. As soon as we get them back, we stop noticing them again. That was the problem with the people who felt let down by Wobum House. They had lived with deprivation for so long that they could think of nothing else, but once they got back the things they had lost, they were amazed to discover that no great change had taken place in them. The world was just as it had always been. Their bellies were full now, but nothing else had been altered in the least.”
alimentopia.consequences“My dear good man,” he would say, for example. “Take a careful look at this tea cup. Hold it in your hand, if you wish. Close your eyes, put it to your lips, and imagine yourself drinking tea from it—just as I did thirty-one years ago, in the drawing rooms of Countess Oblomov. I was young back in those days, a student of literature at the and thin, if you can believe it, thin and handsome, with a beautiful head of curly hair. (...) The Countess overwhelmed me with her generosity (...) but of the gifis she brought with her, the endless kindnesses she bestowed on me. (...) Among them was an exquisite tea set that had once belonged to a member of the French court (the due de Fantomas, I believe), which I used only when she came to visit me, hoarding it for those times when passion flung her across the snow-driven streets of ‘Minsk and into my arms. Alas, time has been cruel. The set has suffered the fate of the years: saucers have cracked, cups have broken, a world has been lost. And yet, for all that, a single remnant has survived, a final link to the past. Treat it gently, my friend. You are holding my memories in your hand.” The trick, I think, was his ability to make inert things come to life.”
alimentopia.consequences“After completing our business with the Resurrection Agents, we often went back [to Boris’s apartment] for a glass of tea. Boris was very fond of tea, and he usually served some kind of pastry to go along with it-scandalous treats from the House of Cakes on Windsor Boulevard: cream puffs, cinnamon buns, chocolate eclairs, all bought at horrific expense. Boris could not resist these minor indulgences, however, and he savored them slowly, his chewing accompanied by a faint musical rumbling in his throat, a steady undercurrent of sound that fell somewhere between laughter and a prolonged sigh. I took pleasure in these teas as well, but less for the food than for Boris’s insistence on sharing it with me. My young widow friend is too wan, he would say. We must put more flesh on her bones, bring the bloom back to her cheeks, the bloom in the eyes of Miss Anna Blume herself. (...) After slicking back the strands of his thinning hair and dousing his neck with cologne, he would come striding out into the cramped and dusty living room to prepare the tea. (...) Sometimes, he would pick out a couple of [his hats] for us to wear while we were having our tea. (...) If we both wore them while we drank our tea, then we were bound to have more intelligent and stimulating conversations.”
alimentopia.consequences“For two months he did little else but look for me—sleeping wherever he could, eating only when he had no choice. (...) If it hadn’t been for my body—the occasional demands of my stomach, my bowels—I might never have moved again.”
alimentopia.consequences“He slowly put on weight, slowly began to resemble the person he had once been, but not everything could be the same for him—not now, not anymore.”
alimentopia.consequences‘We give people food and shelter for a little while. and that’s all—a minimal kind of sustenance that barely helps anyone. In the old days, people would come because they wanted to be near my father. (...) He made people feel better just by being who he was. People were given food, but they were also given hope.”
alimentopia.consequences“People are dying out there, and whether we give them a bowl of soup or save their souls, they're still going to die.”
alimentopia.consequences“The idea was to spare as much money as possible for food, and given that this was the most important thing, the thing that did the most good for the residents, we all agreed on the correctness of this approach. Still, as the ffth-floor rooms continued to empty out, not even the food supply could withstand the erosion. One by one, items were eliminated—sugar, salt, butter, fut, the small rations of meat we had allowed ourselves, the occasional glass of milk. Each time Victoria announced another one of these economies, Maggie Vine would throw a fit—erupting into a wild clown’s pantomime of a person in tears, banging her head against the wall, flapping her arms against her legs as though she meant to fly away. It was no picnic for any of us, however. We had all grown accustomed to having enough to eat, and these deprivations caused a painful shock to our systems. I had to think through the whole question for myself again—what it means to be hungry, how to detach the idea of food from the idea of pleasure, how to accept what you are given and not crave for more. By mid-summer our diet was down to a variety of grains, starches, and root vegetables—turnips, beets, carrots. We tried to plant a garden out back, but seeds were scarce, and we managed to grow only a few heads of lettuce. Maggie improvised as best she could, boiling up a number of thin soups, angrily preparing concoctions of beans and noodles, pounding out dumplings in a swirl of white flour—gooey dough balls that nearly made one gag. Compared to how we had been eating before, this was awful stuff, but it kept us alive for all that. The grim thing was not really the quality of the food, but the certainty that things were only going to get worse. Little by little, the distinction between Woburn House and the rest ofthe city was growing smaller. We were being swallowed up, and not one of us knew how to prevent it”
alimentopia.consequences“I don't go out much anymore. Only when my tum comes to do the shopping. but even then Sam usually volunteers to take my place. (...) I continue to do most of the cooking, but after preparing meals for twenty or thirty people at a time, cooking for four is almost nothing. We don’t eat much in any case. Enough to stifle the pangs, but hardly more than that. We're trying to hoard our money for the trip and mustn't depart from this regime.”
alimentopia.consequences“Boris moved in with us about a month ago. He ts a good deal thinner than he used to be, and every now and then I can detect a certain haggard look in his face, as though he were suffering from some illness. He never complains, however, and therefore it is impossible to know what the trouble is. Physically, there is no question that he has lost some of his bounce, but I don’t think his spirits have been affected by it, at least not in any obvious way.
alimentopia.consequences“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, Ihave to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.leftovers“It is even worse for the ones who fight their hunger. Thinking about food too much can only lead to trouble. These are the ones who are obsessed, who refuse to give in to the facts. They prowl the streets at all hours, scavenging for morsels, taking enormous risks for even the smallest crumb. No matter how much they are able to find, it will never be enough. They eat without ever filling themselves, tearing into their food with animal haste, their bony fingers picking their quivering jaws never shut. Most of it dribbles down their chins, and what they manage to swallow, they usually throw up again in a few minutes. It is a slow death, as if food were a fire, a madness, buming them up from within. They think they are eating to stay alive, but in the end they are the ones who are eaten.”
alimentopia.leftovers“The municipal markets are probably the safest, most reliable places to shop, but the prices are high and the selections paltry. One day there will be nothing but radishes, another day nothing but stale chocolate cake. To change your diet so often and so drastically can be very hard on the stomach. But the municipal markets have the advantage of being guarded by the police, and at least you know that what you buy there will wind up in your own stomach and not someone else’s. Food theft is so common in the streets that itis not even considered a crime anymore. On top of that, the municipal markets are the only legally sanctioned form of food distribution.”
alimentopia.leftovers“There are many private food sellers around the city. but their goods can be confiscated at any time. Even those who can afford to pay the police bribes necessary to stay in business still face the constant threat of attacks from thieves. Thieves also plague the customers of the private markets, and it has been statistically proven that one out of every two purchases leads to a robbery. It hardly seems worth it, I think, to risk so much for the fleeting joy of an orange or the taste of boiled ham. But the people are insatiable: hunger is a curse that comes every day, and the stomach is a bottomless pit, a hole as big as the world. The private sellers, therefore, do a good business, in spite on the obstacles, picking up from one place and going to another, constantly on the move, appearing for an hour or two somewhere and then vanishing out of sight. One word of warning, however. If you must have the foods from the private markets, then be sure to avoid the renegade grocers, for fraud is rampant, and there are many people who will sell anything just to tun a profit: eggs and oranges filled with sawdust, bottles of piss pretending to be beer.”
alimentopia.leftovers“Whereas previously you would not think twice about tossing an orange rind onto the street, now even the rinds are ground up into mush and eaten by many people.”
alimentopia.leftovers"It is an odd thing. I believe, to be constantly looking down at the ground, always searching for broken and discarded things. After a while, it must surely affect the brain. (...) A pulverized apple and a pulverized orange are finally the same thing, aren’t they?”
alimentopia.leftovers“Ants and cockroaches moved about unmolested, and the whole place stank of tumed food, unwashed clothes, and dust.”
alimentopia.leftovers“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.leftovers“The remarkable thing was how quickly everyone adapted to the material comforts that were offered—the beds and showers, the good food and clean clothes, the chance to do nothing. After two or three days at Wobum House, men and women who had been eating out of garbage cans could sit down to a large spread at an attractively set table with all the aplomb and composure of fat, middle-class burghers. Perhaps that is not as strange as it seems. We all take things for granted, and when it comes to such basic things as food and shelter, things that are probably ours by natural right, then it doesn’t take long for us to think of them as an integral part of ourselves. It is only when we lose them that we ever notice the things we had. As soon as we get them back, we stop noticing them again. That was the problem with the people who felt let down by Wobum House. They had lived with deprivation for so long that they could think of nothing else, but once they got back the things they had lost, they were amazed to discover that no great change had taken place in them. The world was just as it had always been. Their bellies were full now, but nothing else had been altered in the least.”
alimentopia.places“It is even worse for the ones who fight their hunger. Thinking about food too much can only lead to trouble. These are the ones who are obsessed, who refuse to give in to the facts. They prowl the streets at all hours, scavenging for morsels, taking enormous risks for even the smallest crumb. No matter how much they are able to find, it will never be enough. They eat without ever filling themselves, tearing into their food with animal haste, their bony fingers picking their quivering jaws never shut. Most of it dribbles down their chins, and what they manage to swallow, they usually throw up again in a few minutes. It is a slow death, as if food were a fire, a madness, buming them up from within. They think they are eating to stay alive, but in the end they are the ones who are eaten.”
alimentopia.places“Then there ts the Pleasure Cruise, which can go on for as long as two weeks. The customers are treated to an opulent life, catered to in a manner that rivals the splendor of the old luxury hotels. There are elaborate meals, wines (...) This runs into quite a bit of money, but for some people the chance to live the good life, even for a short while, is an irresistible temptation.”
alimentopia.places“From now on, there will be a roof over your head and food to eat.”
alimentopia.places“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.places“She had been doing all the work herself — object hunting in the streets, trips to the Resurrection Agents, buying food at the municipal market, cooking dinner at home, emptying the slops in the morning — and at least now there was someone to share the burden with her.”
alimentopia.places“I am not just talking about his grumbling. nor the constant little digs he would make about how much money I earned or the food I brought home for our meals.”
alimentopia.places“That morning was particularly grueling for her, and as she slowly went about the job of gathering herself together, I puttered around the apartment as I usually did, trying to act as though nothing had happened: boiling water, slicing bread, setting the table — just sticking to the normal routine. On most mornings, Ferdinand went on sleeping until the last possible moment, rarely budging until he could smell the porridge cooking on the stove (...) Isabel and I had both completed our various preparations and were ready to sit down to breakfast. Ordinarily, one of us would have roused Ferdinand by then, but on this morning of mornings neither one of us said a word. (...)’Don’t you think we should wake up Ferdinand? You know how he gets when we start without him. We don’t want him to think we're cheating him out of his share. (...) "It's just that I was enjoying this moment of companionship. We so rarely get to be alone anymore.””
alimentopia.places“Her throat finally stopped working altogether, and because of that she could no longer swallow. From then on, solid food was out of the question, but eventually even water became impossible for her to get down. I was reduced to putting a few drops of moisture on her lips to prevent her mouth from drying up, but we both knew that it was only a matter of time now, since she was literally starving to death, wasting away for lack of any nourishment. It was a remarkable thing, but once I even thought that Isabel was smiling at me, right there at the end, as I sat beside her dabbing water ‘on her lips. (...) She had been so apologetic about getting sick, so ashamed at having to rely on me for everything, but the fact was that I needed her just as much as she needed me. What happened then, right after the smile, if it was a smile, was that Isabel began to choke on her own saliva. She just couldn’t get it down anymore, and though Tried to clean out her mouth with my fingers, too much of it was sliding back down her throat, and soon there was no more air left for her to breathe.”
alimentopia.places“I sold dishes, clothes, bedding, pots, pans, God knows what else—anything I could get my hands on.”
alimentopia.places“It was a small room, but not so small that two people could not fit into it. A mattress on the floor, a desk and chair by the window, a wood-buming stove, quantities of papers and books piled against one of the walls, clothes in a cardboard box.”
alimentopia.places“We often talked about home then, summoning up as many memories as we could, bringing back the smallest, most specific images in a kind of languorous incantation—the maple trees along Miro Avenue in October, the Roman numeral clocks in the public school classrooms, the green dragon light fixture in the Chinese restaurant across from the university. We were able to share the flavor of these things, to relive the myriad incidentals of a world we had both known since childhood, and it helped to keep our spirits up, I think, helped to make us believe that some day we would be able to retum to all that.”
alimentopia.places“These housing arrangements were fully subsidized (which explained the presence of the cast-iron stove in Sam’s room and the miraculously functioning sinks and toilets ‘on the sixth floor)...”
alimentopia.places“The books were how we kept warm during the winter. In the absence of any other kind of fuel, we would burn them in the cast-iron stove for heat.”
alimentopia.places“Early that evening she came back to my room with a tray of food.”
alimentopia.places“Three times a day someone would come to visit me—twice to deliver meals, once to empty the chamber pot.”
alimentopia.places“Everyone was given a clean bed and two warm meals a day.”
alimentopia.places“Every resident, as we called them, had to agree to certain conditions before being allowed to stay at Wobum House. No fighting or stealing, for example, and a willingness to pitch in with the chores: making one’s bed, carrying one’s plate to the kitchen after meals, and so on. In exchange, the residents were given room and board, a new set of clothes, an opportunity to shower every day, and unlimited use of the facilities.”
alimentopia.places“Most were grateful. of course, most appreciated what was being done for them, but there were many others who had a difficult time of it. Disputes among residents were ‘common, and it seemed that just about anything could set them off: the way someone ate his food or picked his nose, the opinion of this one as opposed to that one, the way someone coughed or snored while everyone else was trying to sleep—all the petty squabbles that occur when people are suddenly thrown together under one roof”
alimentopia.places“The remarkable thing was how quickly everyone adapted to the material comforts that were offered—the beds and showers, the good food and clean clothes, the chance to do nothing. After two or three days at Wobum House, men and women who had been eating out of garbage cans could sit down to a large spread at an attractively set table with all the aplomb and composure of fat, middle-class burghers. Perhaps that is not as strange as it seems. We all take things for granted, and when it comes to such basic things as food and shelter, things that are probably ours by natural right, then it doesn’t take long for us to think of them as an integral part of ourselves. It is only when we lose them that we ever notice the things we had. As soon as we get them back, we stop noticing them again. That was the problem with the people who felt let down by Wobum House. They had lived with deprivation for so long that they could think of nothing else, but once they got back the things they had lost, they were amazed to discover that no great change had taken place in them. The world was just as it had always been. Their bellies were full now, but nothing else had been altered in the least.”
alimentopia.places“After completing our business with the Resurrection Agents, we often went back [to Boris’s apartment] for a glass of tea. Boris was very fond of tea, and he usually served some kind of pastry to go along with it-scandalous treats from the House of Cakes on Windsor Boulevard: cream puffs, cinnamon buns, chocolate eclairs, all bought at horrific expense. Boris could not resist these minor indulgences, however, and he savored them slowly, his chewing accompanied by a faint musical rumbling in his throat, a steady undercurrent of sound that fell somewhere between laughter and a prolonged sigh. I took pleasure in these teas as well, but less for the food than for Boris’s insistence on sharing it with me. My young widow friend is too wan, he would say. We must put more flesh on her bones, bring the bloom back to her cheeks, the bloom in the eyes of Miss Anna Blume herself. (...) After slicking back the strands of his thinning hair and dousing his neck with cologne, he would come striding out into the cramped and dusty living room to prepare the tea. (...) Sometimes, he would pick out a couple of [his hats] for us to wear while we were having our tea. (...) If we both wore them while we drank our tea, then we were bound to have more intelligent and stimulating conversations.”
alimentopia.places“The idea was to spare as much money as possible for food, and given that this was the most important thing, the thing that did the most good for the residents, we all agreed on the correctness of this approach. Still, as the ffth-floor rooms continued to empty out, not even the food supply could withstand the erosion. One by one, items were eliminated—sugar, salt, butter, fut, the small rations of meat we had allowed ourselves, the occasional glass of milk. Each time Victoria announced another one of these economies, Maggie Vine would throw a fit—erupting into a wild clown’s pantomime of a person in tears, banging her head against the wall, flapping her arms against her legs as though she meant to fly away. It was no picnic for any of us, however. We had all grown accustomed to having enough to eat, and these deprivations caused a painful shock to our systems. I had to think through the whole question for myself again—what it means to be hungry, how to detach the idea of food from the idea of pleasure, how to accept what you are given and not crave for more. By mid-summer our diet was down to a variety of grains, starches, and root vegetables—turnips, beets, carrots. We tried to plant a garden out back, but seeds were scarce, and we managed to grow only a few heads of lettuce. Maggie improvised as best she could, boiling up a number of thin soups, angrily preparing concoctions of beans and noodles, pounding out dumplings in a swirl of white flour—gooey dough balls that nearly made one gag. Compared to how we had been eating before, this was awful stuff, but it kept us alive for all that. The grim thing was not really the quality of the food, but the certainty that things were only going to get worse. Little by little, the distinction between Woburn House and the rest ofthe city was growing smaller. We were being swallowed up, and not one of us knew how to prevent it”
alimentopia.places“I don't go out much anymore. Only when my tum comes to do the shopping. but even then Sam usually volunteers to take my place. (...) I continue to do most of the cooking, but after preparing meals for twenty or thirty people at a time, cooking for four is almost nothing. We don’t eat much in any case. Enough to stifle the pangs, but hardly more than that. We're trying to hoard our money for the trip and mustn't depart from this regime.”
alimentopia.places“Everyone else is asleep, and I am sitting downstairs in the kitchen, trying to imagine what is ahead of me.”
alimentopia.places“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, Ihave to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.prohibitions“you [as a member of the Runners] must go through a series of difficult initiations: holding your breath under water, fasting (...) Once you have been accepted, you must, submit to the code of the group. This involves (...) a gradually reduced intake of food.”
alimentopia.servers“At one point I sold my bags to a Resurrection Agent, and that kept me in food for an ample stretch...”
alimentopia.servers“From now on, there will be a roof over your head and food to eat.”
alimentopia.servers“Since Ferdinand had relinquished all practical decisions to his wife long ago, it would have been difficult for him to assert his authority in this one area without tacitily conceding that he should assume more responsibility in others.”
alimentopia.servers“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.servers“She had been doing all the work herself — object hunting in the streets, trips to the Resurrection Agents, buying food at the municipal market, cooking dinner at home, emptying the slops in the morning — and at least now there was someone to share the burden with her.”
alimentopia.servers“I took over the day-to-day affairs of the household. I was the one in charge, the one who did everything. I’m sure that will make you laugh. You remember how it used to be for me at home: the cook, the maid (...) I never had to lift a finger. (...) Now I had become a drudge, the sole support of two people I would never even have met in my old life.”
alimentopia.servers“That morning was particularly grueling for her, and as she slowly went about the job of gathering herself together, I puttered around the apartment as I usually did, trying to act as though nothing had happened: boiling water, slicing bread, setting the table — just sticking to the normal routine. On most mornings, Ferdinand went on sleeping until the last possible moment, rarely budging until he could smell the porridge cooking on the stove (...) Isabel and I had both completed our various preparations and were ready to sit down to breakfast. Ordinarily, one of us would have roused Ferdinand by then, but on this morning of mornings neither one of us said a word. (...)’Don’t you think we should wake up Ferdinand? You know how he gets when we start without him. We don’t want him to think we're cheating him out of his share. (...) "It's just that I was enjoying this moment of companionship. We so rarely get to be alone anymore.””
alimentopia.servers“I kept imagining that something would happen to her while I was gone, that she would die without my being there, and this would be enough to throw me off completely, to make me forget the work I had to do. And believe me, this work had to be done. Otherwise, there would have been nothing for us to eat.”
alimentopia.servers“Her throat finally stopped working altogether, and because of that she could no longer swallow. From then on, solid food was out of the question, but eventually even water became impossible for her to get down. I was reduced to putting a few drops of moisture on her lips to prevent her mouth from drying up, but we both knew that it was only a matter of time now, since she was literally starving to death, wasting away for lack of any nourishment. It was a remarkable thing, but once I even thought that Isabel was smiling at me, right there at the end, as I sat beside her dabbing water ‘on her lips. (...) She had been so apologetic about getting sick, so ashamed at having to rely on me for everything, but the fact was that I needed her just as much as she needed me. What happened then, right after the smile, if it was a smile, was that Isabel began to choke on her own saliva. She just couldn’t get it down anymore, and though Tried to clean out her mouth with my fingers, too much of it was sliding back down her throat, and soon there was no more air left for her to breathe.”
alimentopia.serversthe project would give work to thousands of people. What kind of pay were they offering? I asked. No money, he said, but a place to live and one warm meal a day. ‘Was I interested in signing up? No thanks, I said, I have other things to do. Well, he said, there would be plenty of time for me to change my mind.”
alimentopia.servers“In late November, I came close to being arrested in a food riot on Ptolemy Boulevard.”
alimentopia.servers“He was in bad shape when I moved in, malnourished, coughing constantly, and it took more than a month before he was restored to a semblance of decent health. Until then, I did nearly all the work. I went out shopping for food, I took care of emptying the slops, Icooked our meals and kept the room clean. Later on, when Sam was strong enough to brave the cold again, he began slipping out in the momings to do the chores himself, insisting that I stay in bed to catch up on my sleep. He had a great talent for kindness, Sam did—and he loved me well, much better than I had ever expected to be loved by anyone.”
alimentopia.servers“I got to know many of them na casual sort of way—standing in line with my bucket at the sixth floor sink, exchanging food tips with the women, listening to the gossip— but I followed Sam's advice and did not become involved with any of them, keeping a friendly but reserved distance.”
alimentopia.servers“Given Sam's involvement with the pregnancy, this cold alarmed him to the point of hysteria. He dropped everything to take care of me, hovering around the bed like a demented nurse, throwing away money on extravagant items like tea and canned soups. (...) He would do all the shopping and errands himself. (...)"Just because I'm pregnant, I don’t want to be treated like an invalid,” I said.”
alimentopia.servers“Early that evening she came back to my room with a tray of food.”
alimentopia.servers“Three times a day someone would come to visit me—twice to deliver meals, once to empty the chamber pot.”
alimentopia.servers‘Beds were bought, kitchen supplies were bought, and little by little they worked their way through the remaining assets of the Wobum fortune to maintain the operation.”
alimentopia.servers“The only other person on the staff lived downstairs, in a room just off the kitchen. That was Maggie Vine, a deaf-mute woman of no particular age who served as the cook and laundress. She was very short, with thick, stumpy thighs and a broad face crowned by a jungle of red hair. (...)She went about her work in a kind of sullen trance, doggedly and efficiently completing every job that was assigned to her, working such long hours that I wondered if she ever slept.”
alimentopia.servers“Every resident, as we called them, had to agree to certain conditions before being allowed to stay at Wobum House. No fighting or stealing, for example, and a willingness to pitch in with the chores: making one’s bed, carrying one’s plate to the kitchen after meals, and so on. In exchange, the residents were given room and board, a new set of clothes, an opportunity to shower every day, and unlimited use of the facilities.”
alimentopia.servers“The Woburn House supplier was a man named Boris Stepanovich. He was the one who brought us the food we needed, the bars of soap, the towels, the odd piece of equipment. He showed up as often as four or five times a week, delivering the things we had asked for and then carrying off yet another treasure from the Wobum estate a china teapot, a set of antimacassars, a violin or picture frame—all the objects that had been stored in the fifth-floor rooms and that continued to provide the cash that kept Wobum House running.”
alimentopia.servers“I was never a party to Boris’s buying trips (where he found the food for Wobum House and how he managed to locate the things we ordered from him), but I often observed him as he went about the business of selling the objects that Victoria had chosen to liquidate. He took a ten percent cut from these deals, but to watch him in action you would have thought he was working entirely for himself”
alimentopia.servers“After completing our business with the Resurrection Agents, we often went back [to Boris’s apartment] for a glass of tea. Boris was very fond of tea, and he usually served some kind of pastry to go along with it-scandalous treats from the House of Cakes on Windsor Boulevard: cream puffs, cinnamon buns, chocolate eclairs, all bought at horrific expense. Boris could not resist these minor indulgences, however, and he savored them slowly, his chewing accompanied by a faint musical rumbling in his throat, a steady undercurrent of sound that fell somewhere between laughter and a prolonged sigh. I took pleasure in these teas as well, but less for the food than for Boris’s insistence on sharing it with me. My young widow friend is too wan, he would say. We must put more flesh on her bones, bring the bloom back to her cheeks, the bloom in the eyes of Miss Anna Blume herself. (...) After slicking back the strands of his thinning hair and dousing his neck with cologne, he would come striding out into the cramped and dusty living room to prepare the tea. (...) Sometimes, he would pick out a couple of [his hats] for us to wear while we were having our tea. (...) If we both wore them while we drank our tea, then we were bound to have more intelligent and stimulating conversations.”
alimentopia.servers“The idea was to spare as much money as possible for food, and given that this was the most important thing, the thing that did the most good for the residents, we all agreed on the correctness of this approach. Still, as the ffth-floor rooms continued to empty out, not even the food supply could withstand the erosion. One by one, items were eliminated—sugar, salt, butter, fut, the small rations of meat we had allowed ourselves, the occasional glass of milk. Each time Victoria announced another one of these economies, Maggie Vine would throw a fit—erupting into a wild clown’s pantomime of a person in tears, banging her head against the wall, flapping her arms against her legs as though she meant to fly away. It was no picnic for any of us, however. We had all grown accustomed to having enough to eat, and these deprivations caused a painful shock to our systems. I had to think through the whole question for myself again—what it means to be hungry, how to detach the idea of food from the idea of pleasure, how to accept what you are given and not crave for more. By mid-summer our diet was down to a variety of grains, starches, and root vegetables—turnips, beets, carrots. We tried to plant a garden out back, but seeds were scarce, and we managed to grow only a few heads of lettuce. Maggie improvised as best she could, boiling up a number of thin soups, angrily preparing concoctions of beans and noodles, pounding out dumplings in a swirl of white flour—gooey dough balls that nearly made one gag. Compared to how we had been eating before, this was awful stuff, but it kept us alive for all that. The grim thing was not really the quality of the food, but the certainty that things were only going to get worse. Little by little, the distinction between Woburn House and the rest ofthe city was growing smaller. We were being swallowed up, and not one of us knew how to prevent it”
alimentopia.servers“Then Maggie disappeared. (...) After that, Willie and I took over the kitchen duties.”
alimentopia.servers“After Frick’s body was carried off, Willie was never really the same. He continued to do his work, but only in silence, in a solitude of blank stares and shrugs. (...) Working together as we did in the kitchen every day, I probably spent more time with him than anyone else. (...) He began going out after dinner, rarely returning before two or three in the morning. (...) One morning he failed to show up altogether. I thought that perhaps he was gone for good, but then, just after lunch, he walked into the kitchen without a word and started chopping vegetables, almost daring me to be impressed by his arrogance. (...) I gave up depending on him to do his share of the work. When he was there, I accepted his help; when he was gone, I did the work myself”
alimentopia.servers“I don't go out much anymore. Only when my tum comes to do the shopping. but even then Sam usually volunteers to take my place. (...) I continue to do most of the cooking, but after preparing meals for twenty or thirty people at a time, cooking for four is almost nothing. We don’t eat much in any case. Enough to stifle the pangs, but hardly more than that. We're trying to hoard our money for the trip and mustn't depart from this regime.”
alimentopia.servers“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, Ihave to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.species“This is how I live, her letter continued. I don’t eat much. Just enough to keep me going from step to step, and no more. At times my weakness is so great, I feel the next step will never come. But I manage. In spite of the lapses, I keep myself going. ‘You should see how well I manage.”
alimentopia.species“I eat as little as I can.”
alimentopia.species“I eat as little as I can.”
alimentopia.species“It is also possible to become so good at not eating that eventually you can eat nothing at all.”
alimentopia.species“It is even worse for the ones who fight their hunger. Thinking about food too much can only lead to trouble. These are the ones who are obsessed, who refuse to give in to the facts. They prowl the streets at all hours, scavenging for morsels, taking enormous risks for even the smallest crumb. No matter how much they are able to find, it will never be enough. They eat without ever filling themselves, tearing into their food with animal haste, their bony fingers picking their quivering jaws never shut. Most of it dribbles down their chins, and what they manage to swallow, they usually throw up again in a few minutes. It is a slow death, as if food were a fire, a madness, buming them up from within. They think they are eating to stay alive, but in the end they are the ones who are eaten.”
alimentopia.species“The municipal markets are probably the safest, most reliable places to shop, but the prices are high and the selections paltry. One day there will be nothing but radishes, another day nothing but stale chocolate cake. To change your diet so often and so drastically can be very hard on the stomach. But the municipal markets have the advantage of being guarded by the police, and at least you know that what you buy there will wind up in your own stomach and not someone else’s. Food theft is so common in the streets that itis not even considered a crime anymore. On top of that, the municipal markets are the only legally sanctioned form of food distribution.”
alimentopia.species“There are many private food sellers around the city. but their goods can be confiscated at any time. Even those who can afford to pay the police bribes necessary to stay in business still face the constant threat of attacks from thieves. Thieves also plague the customers of the private markets, and it has been statistically proven that one out of every two purchases leads to a robbery. It hardly seems worth it, I think, to risk so much for the fleeting joy of an orange or the taste of boiled ham. But the people are insatiable: hunger is a curse that comes every day, and the stomach is a bottomless pit, a hole as big as the world. The private sellers, therefore, do a good business, in spite on the obstacles, picking up from one place and going to another, constantly on the move, appearing for an hour or two somewhere and then vanishing out of sight. One word of warning, however. If you must have the foods from the private markets, then be sure to avoid the renegade grocers, for fraud is rampant, and there are many people who will sell anything just to tun a profit: eggs and oranges filled with sawdust, bottles of piss pretending to be beer.”
alimentopia.species“If the words can consume you, you will be able to forget your present hunger and enter what people call the “arena of the sustaining nimbus.” There are even those who say there is nutritional value in these food talks - given the proper concentration and an equal desire to believe in the words among those taking part.”
alimentopia.species“you [as a member of the Runners] must go through a series of difficult initiations: holding your breath under water, fasting (...) Once you have been accepted, you must, submit to the code of the group. This involves (...) a gradually reduced intake of food.”
alimentopia.species“Then there ts the Pleasure Cruise, which can go on for as long as two weeks. The customers are treated to an opulent life, catered to in a manner that rivals the splendor of the old luxury hotels. There are elaborate meals, wines (...) This runs into quite a bit of money, but for some people the chance to live the good life, even for a short while, is an irresistible temptation.”
alimentopia.species“In the city, the best approach is to believe only what your own eyes tell you. But not even that is infallible. For few things are ever what they seem to be (...) For it is one thing to do this when the object before your eyes is a pencil, say, or a crust of bread. But what happens when you find yourself looking at a dead child (...) lying in the street...”
alimentopia.species“Where vegetables are grown, for example, and how they are transported to the city. I can’t give you the answers, and I have never met anyone who could. People talk about agricultural zones in the hinterlands to the west, but that doesn’t mean there is any truth to it.”
alimentopia.species“wine is so scarce now that only the rich can afford it.”
alimentopia.species“Whereas previously you would not think twice about tossing an orange rind onto the street, now even the rinds are ground up into mush and eaten by many people.”
alimentopia.species“I stole food from an old man who tried to rob me one night in the atrium of the old Hypnotists Theatre - snatched the porridge right out of his hand and didn’t even feel sorry about it. I had no friends, no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with.”
alimentopia.species“I stole food from an old man who tried to rob me one night in the atrium of the old Hypnotists Theatre - snatched the porridge right out of his hand and didn’t even feel sorry about it. I had no friends, no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with.”
alimentopia.species“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
alimentopia.species“That morning was particularly grueling for her, and as she slowly went about the job of gathering herself together, I puttered around the apartment as I usually did, trying to act as though nothing had happened: boiling water, slicing bread, setting the table — just sticking to the normal routine. On most mornings, Ferdinand went on sleeping until the last possible moment, rarely budging until he could smell the porridge cooking on the stove (...) Isabel and I had both completed our various preparations and were ready to sit down to breakfast. Ordinarily, one of us would have roused Ferdinand by then, but on this morning of mornings neither one of us said a word. (...)’Don’t you think we should wake up Ferdinand? You know how he gets when we start without him. We don’t want him to think we're cheating him out of his share. (...) "It's just that I was enjoying this moment of companionship. We so rarely get to be alone anymore.””
alimentopia.species“Her throat finally stopped working altogether, and because of that she could no longer swallow. From then on, solid food was out of the question, but eventually even water became impossible for her to get down. I was reduced to putting a few drops of moisture on her lips to prevent her mouth from drying up, but we both knew that it was only a matter of time now, since she was literally starving to death, wasting away for lack of any nourishment. It was a remarkable thing, but once I even thought that Isabel was smiling at me, right there at the end, as I sat beside her dabbing water ‘on her lips. (...) She had been so apologetic about getting sick, so ashamed at having to rely on me for everything, but the fact was that I needed her just as much as she needed me. What happened then, right after the smile, if it was a smile, was that Isabel began to choke on her own saliva. She just couldn’t get it down anymore, and though Tried to clean out her mouth with my fingers, too much of it was sliding back down her throat, and soon there was no more air left for her to breathe.”
alimentopia.species“Three days later, they gave me a send-off party with champagne and cigars. Bogat spoke a toast, and everyone drank to my health, shook my hand, slapped me on the back. I felt like a guest at my own funeral.”
alimentopia.species“He would (...) spin off into a depression that lasted anywhere from one to three days. These black moods were invariably followed by periods of extreme tenderness He would buy small presents for me then—an apple, for example, or a ribbon for my hair, or a piece of chocolate. It was probably wrong of him to spend the extra money, but I found it difficult not to be moved by these gestures. I was always the practical one, the no-nonsense housewife who scrimped and fretted, but when Sam came in with some extravagance like that, I would feel overwhelmed, absolutely flooded with joy. I couldn't help it. I needed to know that he loved me, and if it meant that our money would run out a little sooner, I was willing to pay that price.”
alimentopia.species“Given Sam's involvement with the pregnancy, this cold alarmed him to the point of hysteria. He dropped everything to take care of me, hovering around the bed like a demented nurse, throwing away money on extravagant items like tea and canned soups. (...) He would do all the shopping and errands himself. (...)"Just because I'm pregnant, I don’t want to be treated like an invalid,” I said.”
alimentopia.species“For right then, in the tiny interval that elapsed before he shut the door again, I was able to see clearly into the other room, and there was no mistaking what I saw in there: three or four human bodies hanging naked from meat-hooks, and another man with a hatchet leaning over a table and lopping off the limbs of another corpse. There had been rumors circulating in the library that human slaughterhouses now existed, but I hadn’t believed them.”
alimentopia.species“I knew the difference between a Beaujolais and a Bordeaux, and I understood why Schubert was a greater musician than Schumann. Given the world that Victoria had been born into at Wobum House, I was probably closer to being a member of her own class than anyone she had met in years.”
alimentopia.species“My dear good man,” he would say, for example. “Take a careful look at this tea cup. Hold it in your hand, if you wish. Close your eyes, put it to your lips, and imagine yourself drinking tea from it—just as I did thirty-one years ago, in the drawing rooms of Countess Oblomov. I was young back in those days, a student of literature at the and thin, if you can believe it, thin and handsome, with a beautiful head of curly hair. (...) The Countess overwhelmed me with her generosity (...) but of the gifis she brought with her, the endless kindnesses she bestowed on me. (...) Among them was an exquisite tea set that had once belonged to a member of the French court (the due de Fantomas, I believe), which I used only when she came to visit me, hoarding it for those times when passion flung her across the snow-driven streets of ‘Minsk and into my arms. Alas, time has been cruel. The set has suffered the fate of the years: saucers have cracked, cups have broken, a world has been lost. And yet, for all that, a single remnant has survived, a final link to the past. Treat it gently, my friend. You are holding my memories in your hand.” The trick, I think, was his ability to make inert things come to life.”
alimentopia.species“After completing our business with the Resurrection Agents, we often went back [to Boris’s apartment] for a glass of tea. Boris was very fond of tea, and he usually served some kind of pastry to go along with it-scandalous treats from the House of Cakes on Windsor Boulevard: cream puffs, cinnamon buns, chocolate eclairs, all bought at horrific expense. Boris could not resist these minor indulgences, however, and he savored them slowly, his chewing accompanied by a faint musical rumbling in his throat, a steady undercurrent of sound that fell somewhere between laughter and a prolonged sigh. I took pleasure in these teas as well, but less for the food than for Boris’s insistence on sharing it with me. My young widow friend is too wan, he would say. We must put more flesh on her bones, bring the bloom back to her cheeks, the bloom in the eyes of Miss Anna Blume herself. (...) After slicking back the strands of his thinning hair and dousing his neck with cologne, he would come striding out into the cramped and dusty living room to prepare the tea. (...) Sometimes, he would pick out a couple of [his hats] for us to wear while we were having our tea. (...) If we both wore them while we drank our tea, then we were bound to have more intelligent and stimulating conversations.”
alimentopia.species“For two months he did little else but look for me—sleeping wherever he could, eating only when he had no choice. (...) If it hadn’t been for my body—the occasional demands of my stomach, my bowels—I might never have moved again.”
alimentopia.species“People are dying out there, and whether we give them a bowl of soup or save their souls, they're still going to die.”
alimentopia.species“The idea was to spare as much money as possible for food, and given that this was the most important thing, the thing that did the most good for the residents, we all agreed on the correctness of this approach. Still, as the ffth-floor rooms continued to empty out, not even the food supply could withstand the erosion. One by one, items were eliminated—sugar, salt, butter, fut, the small rations of meat we had allowed ourselves, the occasional glass of milk. Each time Victoria announced another one of these economies, Maggie Vine would throw a fit—erupting into a wild clown’s pantomime of a person in tears, banging her head against the wall, flapping her arms against her legs as though she meant to fly away. It was no picnic for any of us, however. We had all grown accustomed to having enough to eat, and these deprivations caused a painful shock to our systems. I had to think through the whole question for myself again—what it means to be hungry, how to detach the idea of food from the idea of pleasure, how to accept what you are given and not crave for more. By mid-summer our diet was down to a variety of grains, starches, and root vegetables—turnips, beets, carrots. We tried to plant a garden out back, but seeds were scarce, and we managed to grow only a few heads of lettuce. Maggie improvised as best she could, boiling up a number of thin soups, angrily preparing concoctions of beans and noodles, pounding out dumplings in a swirl of white flour—gooey dough balls that nearly made one gag. Compared to how we had been eating before, this was awful stuff, but it kept us alive for all that. The grim thing was not really the quality of the food, but the certainty that things were only going to get worse. Little by little, the distinction between Woburn House and the rest ofthe city was growing smaller. We were being swallowed up, and not one of us knew how to prevent it”
alimentopia.species“After Frick’s body was carried off, Willie was never really the same. He continued to do his work, but only in silence, in a solitude of blank stares and shrugs. (...) Working together as we did in the kitchen every day, I probably spent more time with him than anyone else. (...) He began going out after dinner, rarely returning before two or three in the morning. (...) One morning he failed to show up altogether. I thought that perhaps he was gone for good, but then, just after lunch, he walked into the kitchen without a word and started chopping vegetables, almost daring me to be impressed by his arrogance. (...) I gave up depending on him to do his share of the work. When he was there, I accepted his help; when he was gone, I did the work myself”
alimentopia.species“I don't go out much anymore. Only when my tum comes to do the shopping. but even then Sam usually volunteers to take my place. (...) I continue to do most of the cooking, but after preparing meals for twenty or thirty people at a time, cooking for four is almost nothing. We don’t eat much in any case. Enough to stifle the pangs, but hardly more than that. We're trying to hoard our money for the trip and mustn't depart from this regime.”
alimentopia.species“We can tour the countryside in our car, he says, giving performances in exchange for food and lodging”
alimentopia.species“His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness — hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships — as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, Ihave to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it”
dc.contributor.authorAuster, Paul
dc.date.accessioned2024-03-12T17:29:32Z
dc.date.available2024-03-12T17:29:32Z
dc.date.first_ed1987
dc.date.issued1987
dc.description.abstractA dystopian novel represents an unnamed city on the verge of collapsing where people are ready to sell their own body parts to survive. The plot focuses on the Protagonist Anna Bloom, who travels around the city to find her missing brother. The book's main theme is finding the means in the lost world.
dc.identifier.urihttps://cetapsrepository.letras.up.pt/id/cetaps/114171
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherFaber and Faber
dc.rightsmetadata only access
dc.subjectDystopian Texts
dc.titleIn the Country of Last Things
dc.title.alternativeIn the Country of Last Things

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