Food Taster

[Jason Perlow]

This question is for Peter: How did you come up with the idea for The Food Taster? Did you encounter Ugo's dusty 500 year old journal somewhere?

[Peter Elbling]

Five years ago, while visiting a friend in Barga, a village in Northern Tuscany, I was introduced to a neighbor of his by the name of GianCarlo Tula(not his real name.) A short stocky man, now gone to fat, with a profusion of unruly gray hair and a mouth full of gold teeth, GianCarlo told me that he had been born into a family of gypsy high-wire artists in his native Bulgaria. He boasted they had toured the world, appeared twice on the Ed Sullivan Show and once, to advertise a performance at the 69th St. Armory, he crossed Wall Street, blindfolded, thirty stories above the ground. A short time later, distracted by an aching tooth, he fell and broke his right leg in three places.

In short order, he became a pornographic filmmaker, met and married an actress in the Andy Warhol/Studio 54 circuit, and fathered a child. In the late seventies, he returned, or was booted out, to Paris, becoming a fixture on the Eurotrash scene. Somewhere along the way, he married again, and through his second wife, from whom he was also divorced, became interested in rare objects.

Now he suffered from emphysema and was in the care of Berta, a pretty Austrian blonde. (How these guys always manage to get pretty blondes to look after them is beyond me.) I drank Grappa with him while he regaled me with one outrageous story after another; he’d partied with the former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Cuba, sunbathed with Mick Jagger in the South of France, and frolicked in the whorehouses of Bangkok with Saudi Princes.

My friend told GianCarlo that I was also interested in rare objects, to which he replied that he had something of interest which might intrigue me. I said I'd like to see it. He hemmed and hawed; it was the only thing of real value he had left in the world, he would have to speak to his lawyer, etc., I thought it was just another story and so gave it no further thought. Besides, his boasting had begun to weary me and I did not plan to see him again.

The morning before my return to the States, Berta woke us to say that GianCarlo had passed away in the night. We went over immediately. The place had been ransacked; Berta had been looking for money which GianCarlo had promised her and which she could not find. She wanted to give me the ‘something of interest’ GianCarlo had been talking about. It was an old dilapidated manuscript. Knowing GianCarlo, she suspected it was forged, but I took it anyway.

I showed the manuscript to rare book experts in New York and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and to my surprise they assured me it was genuine and even offered to buy it. I declined because I decided to translate it myself--I had studied Italian and had spent quite some time in Italy--and that is what I did on and off for the next four years.

Since most of the story takes place in the town of Corsoli, which was situated where the provinces of Tuscany, Umbria and the Marche meet, I went there several times hoping to find some trace of the city. However, the records indicated that it had been destroyed in the late seventeenth century by a series of earthquakes. The remains had obviously been picked clean by the surrounding communities.

I completed my translation of the document three years ago. I tried to keep as close to the spirit of the original as I could, only updating certain phrases and syntax for the modern reader and, even though some pages were missing and others damaged beyond repair, I believe I have achieved this with a fair measure of success. As far as I know, the manuscript is the only record of that time and place and of its author, Ugo DiFonte.

Peter Elbling

Translator

[thingie]

did this "GianCarlo Tula" ever wear an eyepatch?

[Peter Elbling]

You knew him!

[thingie]

from the coupole and max's and blondes.

did he ever mention any scrolls?

[Peter Elbling]

To be honest I dont remember if he mentioned any scrolls. He talked about so many different things. I do remember he said he had a couple of sketches an artist had done on a napkin at Max's one night and which he claimed were now worth a fortune, but he never showed them to me. He said he had other manscripts and 'important papers' stored in a safe somewhere but again he never told me where. Did he ever show you the scars from his operations?

[thingie]

sorry, it took so long to reply, but

there's something about sc-rs,

i don't even want to think about

it, but scrolls would be no problem,

if i knew where they were.