Less(15)

They are met by a woman in a long black dress patterned with hibiscus blossoms, their guide, who leads them to one of Mexico City’s markets, a stadium of blue corrugated steel, where they are met by four young Spanish men, clearly friends of Arturo’s. Their guide stands before a table of candied fruits and asks if anyone has allergies or things they will not or cannot eat. Silence. Less wonders if he should mention make-believe foods like bugs and slimy Lovecraftian sea horrors, but she is already leading them between the stalls. Bitter chocolates wrapped in paper, piled in ziggurats beside a basket of Aztec whisks, shaped like wooden maces, and jars of multicolored salts such as those Buddhist monks might use to paint mandalas, along with plastic bins of rust-and cocoa-colored seeds, which their guide explains are not seeds but crickets; crayfish and worms both live and toasted, alongside the butcher’s area of rabbits and baby goats still wearing their fluffy black-and-white “socks” to prove they are not cats, a long glass butcher’s case that for Arthur Less increases in horrors as he moves along it, such that it seems like a contest of will, one he is sure to fail, but luckily they turn down the fish aisle, where somehow his heart grows colder among the gray speckled bodies of octopuses coiled in ampersands, the unnamable orange fish with great staring eyes and sharp teeth, the beaked parrotfish whose flesh, Less is told, is blue and tastes of lobster (he smells a lie); and how very close this all is to childhood haunted houses, with their jars of eyeballs, dishes of brains and jellied fingers, and that gruesome delight he felt as a boy.

“Arthur,” the Head says as their guide leads them on between the icy shoals. “What was it like to live with genius? I understand you met Brownburn in your distant youth.”

No one is allowed to say “distant youth” but you, isn’t that a rule? But Less merely says, “Yes, I did.”

“He was a remarkable man, playful, merry, tugging critics this way and that. And his movement was sublime. Full of joy. He and Ross were always one-upping each other, playing a game of it. Ross and Barry and Jacks. They were pranksters. And there’s nothing more serious than a prankster.”

“You knew them?”

“I know them. I teach every one of them in my course on middle-American poetry, by which I don’t mean the middle America of small minds and malt shops, or midcentury America, but rather the middle, the muddle, the void, of America.”

“That sounds—”

“Do you think of yourself as a genius, Arthur?”

“What? Me?”

Apparently the Head takes that as a no. “You and me, we’ve met geniuses. And we know we’re not like them, don’t we? What is it like to go on, knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity? I think it’s the worst kind of hell.”

“Well,” Less said. “I think there’s something between genius and mediocrity—”

“That’s what Virgil never showed Dante. He showed him Plato and Aristotle in a pagan paradise. But what about the lesser minds? Are we consigned to the flames?”

“No, I guess,” Less offers, “just to conferences like this one.”

“You were how old when you met Brownburn?”

Less looks down into a barrel of salt cod. “I was twenty-one years old.”

“I was forty when I happened upon Brownburn. Very late for us to meet. But my first marriage had ended, and suddenly there was humor and invention. He was a great man.”

“He’s still alive.”

“Oh yes, we invited him to the festival.”

“But he’s bedridden in Sonoma,” Less says, his voice finally taking on the fish market’s chill.

“It was an earlier list. Arthur, I should tell you, we have a wonderful surprise for you—”

Their guide stops and addresses the group: “These chilis are the center of Mexican cuisine, which has been labeled by UNESCO as a World Heritage intangible.” She stands beside a row of baskets, all filled with dried chilis in various forms. “Mexico is the main Latin American country that uses hot peppers. You,” she says to Less, “are probably more used to chilis than a Chilean.” One of Arturo’s friends who has joined them for the day is Chilean and nods in agreement. When asked which is the spiciest, the guide consults the vendor and says the tiny pink ones in a jar from Veracruz. Also the most expensive. “Would you like to taste some relishes?” A chorus of Sí! What follows is a contest of escalating difficulty, like a spelling bee. One by one, they taste the relishes, increasing in heat, to see who fails first. Less feels his face flush with each bite, but by the third round he has already outlasted the Head. When given a taste of a five-chili relish, he announces to the group: “This tastes just like my grandmother’s chow-chow.”

They all look at him in shock.

The Chilean: “What did you say?”

“Chow-chow. Ask Professor Van Dervander. It is a relish in the American South.” But the Head says nothing. “It tastes like my grandmother’s chow-chow.”

Slowly, the Chilean begins to guffaw, hand over his mouth. The others seem to be holding something in.

Less shrugs, looking from face to face. “Of course, her chow-chow wasn’t so spicy.”

At that, the dam breaks; all the young men burst into howls of laughter, hooting and weeping beside the chili bins. The vendor looks on with raised eyebrows. And even when it begins to subside, the men keep stoking their laughter, asking Less how often he tastes his grandmother’s chow-chow. And does it taste different at Christmas? And so on. It does not take long for Less to understand, sharing a pitying glance with the Head, feeling the burn of the relish beginning anew in the back of his mouth, that there must be a false cognate in Spanish, yet another false friend…