Then Ficre is alive, and up and out of the bed for his coffee at four thirty, when the birds began to sing. He comes bouncing in the door from the studio at the end of his day, excited to be working on the Italian paintings. Hello, sweetheart. A kiss on the lips. You are back, my darling, as if nothing ever happened. He sets to making red lentils for dinner.
We live right across the street from his studio in this dream. Everything we want is at hand: work, kitchen, gazebo, each other, summer light. How can I leave the peace of this house? I wonder. I have never lived in a house so beautiful. I have never felt so content.
When I wake I know, all of a sudden, that it is time for us to leave. Ficre isn’t here anymore. Ficre is not here. I can make his red lentils anywhere.
SPICY RED LENTIL & TOMATO CURRY
Author: Ficre
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 4 hours 20 minutes
Total time: 4 hours 35 minutes
SERVES: 4–6
Don’t be scared off by the long cook time—for the most part, once you’ve taken care of the chopping, all you’ll need to do is check on this dish occasionally as it simmers. To cut down on cook time, you can also use store-bought vegetable stock rather than making your own (you will need 2–3 cups). A note on tomato passata: although it isn’t incredibly common in the United States I’ve found it at Whole Foods and another grocery store in the area. It’s a tomato purée similar to tomato paste and tomato sauce—the main differences are that the tomatoes in the purée are uncooked, with no additional ingredients added, and it’s not cooked down like tomato paste. If you can’t find it, you can certainly substitute tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes for a slightly different flavor.
INGREDIENTS
For the Stock:
2 heads fennel
2 heads kale
1 yellow onion, cut into large pieces 2 large carrots, cut into large pieces 1 stalk celery, cut into large pieces 4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
For the Tomato Curry Sauce:
24 oz can tomato passata
2 carrots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped 2 tablespoons curry powder
? teaspoon cayenne
? teaspoon paprika
2 cups dry red lentils
? cup fresh cilantro, chopped Salt to taste
INSTRUCTIONS
1. In a large heavy pot, combine the first 6 ingredients and enough water to cover the vegetables by about a half inch. Allow stock to simmer for 4 hours.
2. After the stock has been simmering for about an hour, you’ll want to start making the tomato curry sauce. Combine the tomato passata, 2 chopped carrots, 3 cloves chopped garlic, and the spices in another large heavy pot and allow to simmer 3 hours.
3. Add lentils to tomato curry sauce and let simmer 20–30 minutes more, adding stock as needed to thin it out (about 2–3 cups). The mixture should be thick and creamy, not soupy or dry.
4. Stir in fresh cilantro and remove from heat. Season with salt to taste. Serve lentils alongside basmati rice.
Two
I come out of my first Pilates class exhilarated, blood flowing, stretched and tall. It is the first time in ages I lose myself and forget; my tears come fast and sting just after I think, I cannot wait to get to the phone to call Ficre and tell him.
Rilke surprises me, how true and contemporary he feels in The Book of Hours, poems which he wrote as received spiritual messages or prayers:
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
For Rilke, God is the companion, the hand the reader is exhorted to take. Ficre is not my God; neither do I know who God is. But I find this force in art, poems, and the community I have made.
When we met those many years ago, I let everything happen to me, and it was beauty. Along the road, more beauty, and fear and struggle, and work, and learning, and joy. I could not have kept Ficre’s death from happening, and from happening to us. It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.
If no feeling is final, there is more for me to feel.
Three
How much space for remembering is there in a day? How much should there be? I think about this in my poetry. I don’t want to be a nostalgist. Yet I feed on memory, need it to make poems, the art that is made of the stuff I have: my life and the world around me.
I am grateful for the tug of the day that gets us out of bed and propels us into our lives and responsibilities; memory can be a weight on that. And yet, in it floods, brought willfully, or brought on by a glimpse, a glance, a scent, a sound. One note: the timbre of his voice.
There will never be goodbye. And yet it will close something down, because we have moved to New York, and I feel its urgent press further away from me, even as I know the grieving continues, a huge, intricate, multi-branched coral, sharp and beautiful at the same time.