The Restaurante
an excerpt

CHAPTER 2

To Mario the restaurant business was life and life was feeding people. In Mexico he spent hours in the kitchen while his nanny and the cook gossiped together. He learned how to roast peppers and how to mix tortillas by touch. Afterwards, in America, in Clovis, he worked in the school kitchen to earn free lunches.

While feeding people he learned to communicate with women the way they communicate. He learned to compare stories, one to the other and to sympathize without trying to resolve the problem. And in the kitchen at the school he learned English from the women who fed children so they could feed their children.

Not that Mario always used I statements or preferred to listen reflectively, but he had the ability to reflect and to listen without judging, And he was happy to use those skills when he needed to. Always, afterwards, after the women loved him, he could tell them how to fix the problems and they would do it He could offer his means and resources and skills and they would accept. Overtime he became universally popular—in Clovis. As a young man starting out in business fathers and mothers alike looked past his olive complexion, black hair and accent and considered him a Very Eligible Bachelor. Girls looked past the two room shack the he lived in with his parents and they looked past that his father worked in the fields for their fathers.

People came to the Restaurante out of curiosity and because there was no where else to eat out in town. But as the saying goes, they came back to Mario’s Restaurante because of Mario’s very good food, his gifted conversation and his impeccable manners.

“This Mario could be somebody.” They would murmur as they left the Restaurante.

“Mario…what was his last name? You say you went to school with him?”

“His parents are, who? Oh! They work on the Grady farm? Do they?”

Incredulous statements like this flowed from the lack of information—the blindness--of the middle class of this small town in Oregon.

His father, who spent only two weeks as a day laborer in Portland, came to Clovis with an introduction to Sr. Grady. One of the men he waited for work with at the day labor store front in Portland had been his patient in Chiapas. Dr. Gomez had saved his life. It had been a grueling surgery to remove the bullet form his chest. But the good doctor removed it and he staved of infection and this man survived. The man, Hector Luis stood beside him waiting to be chosen to work for one day, and he wept for his friend Dr. Gomez. The next day Hector Luis arrived with directions to the Grady Farm, with a letter of introduction to Sr Grady and his farm manager, and with bus tickets for Doctor Gomes, Sra. Gomes and small Mario.

So, the farm manager found a place for Dr Gomez in the fields and a place for Sra Gomes in the kitchen of a wealthy neighbor farmer. And because the doctor was a legal immigrant, fluent in English Mario entered school, able to speak with amazing emotional capacity—in Spanish. And with a job in the kitchen to earn him his free lunch.

During his high school years there were many days that Mario pleaded with is father to leave the fields, to move to the city and work as a translator. But beaten down by misfortunes that his son would never understand and sick with grief over the fate of his brothers in the fields—the ones who couldn’t get their kids into school because they moved with the crops and had no legal right to educate their children, Dr Gomez stayed put. He saw nothing but suffering.

And he didn’t see his son’s great empathy or brilliant mind for science. He didn’t see the makings of a surgeon as skillful as he had been with a care for the patient never seen before. All he saw was the suffering that seemed to be all around him. During the day he saw himself and his co-workers scarred from the poisons that made the vegetables and fruits free from pests and perfect in form. Sickened by the process that made food pretty. In the evenings he saw his co-workers on the back porch where he dispensed as many over the counter medicinas as he could afford. He gave them directions in their mother tongue to ease their illness and despair and to keep the medicine from making them worse through misuse. Eventually Dr. Gomez met a man he only called Raul. And once a month Raul brought medicines down from Canada that could help more. But it wasn’t legal. And that made Dr. Gomez hate himself, Raul and America.

Dr Gomez did not see that in his son he could have every thing he really wanted. A legal physician with a proper clinic that the PLO could not close down for failure to pay protection.

Since he did not see the potential his son had to heal the sick of their illness and their worry he did not guide him and help him learn to do this. And so Mario followed the path that was always in front of him. He cooked.

He was fascinated by the properties of food and the power of the kitchen. The reaction of acids to leveners and what heat did to protein. And he loved to serve the food to people. To kids in school who seemed lonely he had a smile. And to pretty girls with shining eyes and rosy cheeks he had a smoldering look and a bit of a smirk. Charming like his mother, handsome like his father. He was also then and still, especially with Shaelondra, every part the aristocrat descended form generations of doctors and Spanish nobility.

Shaelondra came to work at the Restaurante about the same time that Mario stopped wishing his wife had not left him. She had been gone for three years. He had been a divorced Catholic man, a disappointment to himself for a year and a half. It wasn’t exactly waking up one morning and being fine. But it was waking up one morning and seeing a beautiful, lost young lady who seemed more discouraged than he had been and realizing he could help her. Helping people seemed obvious and necessary. Like his ancestral obligation to the people of the villa. Like his fathers oath to first do no harm. He just hadn’t really felt like it for a few years