Eat the City(85)
“DINNER!” Latif’s ten-year-old grandson Jake calls, and the crowd troops into the house, leaving black footprints and spilled juice on a runner of pink paper taped to the hardwood floor. Soon the yard will be hosed down, the winemaking apparatus dismantled, and the five-gallon jugs of golden wine-to-be moved to the chilled cabinet that will host its transformation.
Over the years, Latif assimilated. He forgot Arabic words as he perfected his English. By trial and error, he taught himself American practices like dating—for instance, when a girl agrees to a first date and says she’ll spend the day with you, she doesn’t mean for you to show up to pick her up at seven thirty a.m. Yet he also developed a lonesome nostalgia for all he left behind. His favorite Arabic poem—decades or hundreds of years old, he doesn’t know—is about a man lost alone in the wilderness. The man weeps. He hears a dove weeping too. He says to the dove: “A stranger to a stranger is family.” “That’s how I feel,” Latif says.
In truth, winemaking is a family activity. When a family disperses, and there’s no one to crush with you and hold the jug for you, and eventually drink with you, you don’t make wine. Latif hoped the converse would also be true: If you get people to crush grapes with you, and hold the jug for you, and maybe drink a bit of wine with you, you have family.
When Latif’s children were little, he used to make up fantastical stories about his life in Basra that made it seem like a wondrous, funny place—in one, Latif was the pancake-maker for the queen of Iraq. A photo of Latif’s childhood home hangs on the wall over the stairs, a large, beautiful brick building with tall, domed balconies, and a little boy in a white short-sleeve shirt standing out front, waving at the camera: Latif. “There were two more windows on the right side, four on the other,” says Latif, tracing with his finger the missing pieces outside the edges of the photograph’s frame.
Parents can spend their lifetimes trying to explain themselves to their children. Or they can offer experiences. In a way, the vine and the rituals around it are what Latif bequeaths.
“I want them to remember it, I want the grandchildren to,” Latif says. “I’m trying to give them a sense of the memories I have and make them theirs.”
“Part of it is being a refugee, not having my own home I grew up in,” Latif says, leaning forward. “I’m not able to go back to my past and touch it and re-experience it, so I try to do something here that becomes my creation, that becomes part of what I am.”
Fifteen years ago, Latif sent a sample to a winemakers’ supply store in Pennsylvania and asked for advice on how to improve his wine, but the response was not useful; a friend in the chemistry department at City College offered to read up on pH and sugar content but never ponied up anything new. The wine tastes different each year and really there’s no telling why. “I should spend some more time on ways to improve the quality,” says Latif, in a tone that makes it clear he doesn’t believe it. “You know how it is in this country,” he says. “You’re always looking for ways to make it better.”
In truth, Latif—like Sal and many others in the city—is not a critical oenophile. He makes wine to create ritual, to bind his family together year after year in a land without ritual or sense of family. He makes wine in tribute to his father and his own efforts with the vine. Latif makes wine as though to pour his past into a glass and share it.
EPILOGUE
IN the summer, Jorge Torres invites me to a Father’s Day gathering in his garden in the Bronx. I bring two cartons of lemonade, two heavy watermelons, and two friends to help translate. Jorge breaks out in a huge smile as he talks about his childhood in Puerto Rico, and we while away the afternoon, eating cool watermelon in the heat, playing dominoes, splashing the kids in an inflatable pool, and listening to Jorge’s classic Puerto Rican CDs. More people keep arriving with bags of chips and Cheez Doodles, sodas, and covered aluminum trays full of rice and beans, plantains, pasta, salad. Meanwhile, parts of pigs cook on a spit, sizzling and emitting bewitchingly porky scents. “Happy Father’s Day,” people say to Jorge, or simply: “Congratulations.” It is a day to honor fathers, to honor him.
Toward the end of the afternoon, Jorge pulls the first of the pernil off the spit and beckons us over. “Where’s the machete?” he calls into the casita, and someone brings it out and moves its enormous blade cleanly through the pork. As crisped skin falls, Jorge picks up pieces with his fingers and offers them to us. “Have some more,” he urges, as he lays salty, fatty, tender meat on our plates.
As a person who has always managed on very little, Jorge knows well the role of food in survival. But he also understands the role of food in creating bonds, in telling stories, in building around himself the kind of family, the kind of neighborhood, the kind of city he wants. This feast and camaraderie were possible because Jorge carved space from a crowded Bronx neighborhood for growing things.
When I began work on this book, I thought I would be spending time with people who had been shunted to the edges of an overdeveloped city. But over time, meeting people and reading history, I started to realize that people who produce food draw others around them; they are not isolated, but among the most connected. As much as any other group of laborers and artists, they are the culture of New York. They are the ones who wrangle space to manufacture foods and to share them at feasts and ceremonies—the things that help weave the unruly, disparate strands of the city into something uniquely itself.