Bovara is One of Those Dishes Best Served Cold

I loosened a chunk of cheek from the Bovara with a runcible spoon. I could see where chef had cleanly sliced the cross-section, just below the eye, a shallow crescent scooped from the flesh leaving the organs open to my admiring eyes. Moisture condensed in the cool hollows between the sinus and the thalmus, the thalmus and the cerebellum. The remaining eye blinked.

Everything on the table was as cold as the Bovara: the bread, the silver, the waiter’s thumb resting against the rim of my plate. He had been withdrawing his hand for some time. A drop of wine hung from the bottle’s lip, pregnant enough to fall but somehow hovering. I was waiting for it. Once it fell I could begin.

I swear I had ordered Bovada. But that was an hour ago, sober, so much earlier. But here now, not sober, I wasn’t so sure. No matter. To consume morsels of rubbery Bovara was an honor I could never have prepared myself for much less ordered.

Now the whole head rested on its platter with the hide peeled back from one cheek, the other cheek furred and damp. The horns polished to a mirror shine, depthless, the horns of Bovara disappearring into the infinite.

A truffle was cradled in each nostril like giant booger. Someone in the kitchen had imagined this as whimsical. I understood it only as delicious. There was no whimsy in a Bovara.

My fingers held the spoon. Under the thumbnail a dark crescent still. I had scrubbed until the skin hurt. The sink had swans heads taps that spat water furiously. My front soaked, I’d soaked five hand towels. On the sixth I found a long brown hair and remembered her bending over the basin in my apartment, gathering her hair in one hand so it wouldn’t touch the porcelain. I moved the spoon toward the cheek. Nothing moved. The drop of wine suspended time

There was an almost unbearable amount of room inside that moment. I could have lived there, rented a place, acquired the small complaints of a resident. Already I was noticing things. A darn in the tablecloth. The soft gray sediment at the bottom of the salt cellar. Across the room, a man’s upper denture had detached itself during a laugh and remained suspended just behind his lower lip. His companions hadn’t noticed yet. He had time to reconsider every decision that had brought him to dinner.

The smell thickened: stock, wet wool, something sweet caught beneath the pepper. I was hungry. That was what I kept coming back to, with shame and then irritation at the shame. Whatever else had happened, I hadn’t eaten since morning. Behind the cow’s eye, the dining room bustled, unaware of me at my table, me and my Bovara.

I could see it through the wet black opening: smaller tables, smaller lamps, another waiter holding another bottle, and at the farthest table a man leaning toward a platter. His jacket was mine. He had my bald patch, which seemed an unnecessary detail to reproduce. I watched him watching someone smaller still, down through successive rooms until the candles crowded together and their light resembled the windows of the buildings outside. On every roof a cow.

They had been there when I arrived, although I’d taken them for water tanks. Now I could make out their knees, the dirty ropes of their tails, the way their weight settled over the narrow walls beneath them. One stood above the apartment where I’d left her. Its teat banging against the bedroom window. The curtains were open. I remembered closing them. The spoon warmed in my hand. The Bovara was growing warmer.

There had been a carpet in that room, cheap, beige, with a cigarette burn near the bed. While I knelt I kept putting my finger into the burn. I cannot account for this. There were things to do. Her shoe had come off and was lying upright, perfectly ready to be put on again, and I kept touching that little hole in the carpet as though it were a button that might bring somebody.

The Bovara had a tongue that lay thickly between its teeth. Along its edge were pale impressions where the teeth had rested during a lifetime of cud. I wanted to cover the wound, turn the night around, I wanted the chef to put the missing cheek back, make the Bovara whole again. I wanted to have ordered Bovada, grilled to perfection.

The wine drop lobed longer.

Inside it the room turned upside down. A black car at the curb, its door open, rain climbed from the gutter toward a woman’s bare calf. I knew the calf before I knew the woman. I tried to look higher but the whole evening was trapped in that red bead, packed too tightly to separate. Her leg. The stairwell. My hand finding the switch. I had paid for dinner in advance. This occurred to me with horrible force, as if it settled something.

The waiter’s thumb remained against the plate. Beneath his nail was the same dark crescent as mine. I looked at his cuff, where a thread had come loose, and followed it across the tablecloth into the Bovara’s opened cheek. It tightened when I swallowed. My spoon was full, it moved toward my mouth. My mouth a gaping maw, waiting, waiting.

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