This is how to eat foie gras

I found myself in a castle north of Paris on New Year´s Eve day. I had spent the previous night on an Air France flight, so I took a nap upstairs in one of the chambers most of the afternoon. When I awoke, I had no clue where I was. The candelabra beside my bed that I would use to navigate the corridors at night, the peeling walls, the high ceilings, the view out the window of trees and lawn in the whipping wind.

I made my way groggily down the stairs and into a room where I had heard some laughter. There was a somewhat familiar face, my friend with the castle, and there was a girl who turned out to be her younger sister peeling potatoes at a table by the fire. The fireplace was huge, with a mostly carbon-covered first-person sentence molded into the ironwork behind the fire. There was a thin German with long blond hair talking in Spanish to a Peruvian woman he had met while living in Lima. My French was rusty (rouille), so I tried talking in English to the two of them, but it was so boring I wanted to go back to sleep. The French sisters insisted on doing all the prep work for the party, so all we had to do was talk and drink.

The aperitifs flowed, first kir then cassis, and soon the German was trying to get me to invest in a tourist compound in a Peruvian jungle where ruins had been discovered. "It´s going to be bigger than Machu Pichu," he said. "Just wait till the airport comes in."

I´m kind of a lightweight with the liquor, and I didn´t want to say anything offensive, as I am often tempted to do, so I tried to hold back, but the drinks were too good. Drinking kir is like downing fruit punch for five cents a cup at a summer stand. You get the water component right in your cassis, and that is irresistible as well. Then there´s the wine, mamma mia.

The German had taken a shine to me, so we were sitting next to each other on a couch so soft I felt engulfed like a small child. I must have mentioned I had made a couple short documentaries, because now he was saying, "What would you say if I told you there was a film about the German ambassador to Peru?"

"I´d say, ´What else is on?´"

He looked at me, a bit stunned. "I mean, this is Germany´s number one person in Peru. I have already filmed him for 120 hours."

"I mean, there would have to be something strange or ironic about this person for me to be interested. Does he hate the Peruvian people?"

"No."
¨
"Does he hate his job or is he uncomfortable with Germany´s past, or is there--"

"I mean, I keep the camera rolling, and sometimes you can really see the stress the job puts on him, I mean he´s constantly shaking hands and having to smile all the time, even when he´s in a bad mood."

In came another French sister and a brother, about 21 and 19 respectively. The boy had brought about four friends, and they huddled together giggling all night, only initially at my expense. The sister had just come back from India, where she is studying business in Calcutta. There was a punk girl on the couch mouthing the words to a song called, "Too Drunk to Fuck."

We moved to the long dining room table for dinner. It was 11:30, just before the new year. I fell in love briefly with the girl on my right until she pointed out that I was twice her age. Actually that did little to change things. I tried not to stare at her when it was the guy on my left doing the talking.

His name was Yves, and I had met him the summer before through the friend with the castle, who by the way was named Chantille and worked in public affairs in Paris. Yves taught guitar. I liked him because he didn´t hold it against me that I understood one out of every six jokes he cracked, all of them in the space of a minute. He always patiently tried to explain them, which never helped. I learned a smile and vacant stare into the middle distance, which seemed miraculously to not spoil the punchline moment.

A plate of foie gras went around. I had heard that they´d banned it in Chicago but I´d never seen it. I had also met people in Toulouse who said they´d grown up watching their grandparents force-feed the geese to bloat their livers.

"This is how you must eat it," said Yves. "You take a pretty big hunk of bread and you put a little bit on it and as you place it in your mouth you breathe, breathe, feel the taste course through your entire system, ahh!" His nostrils swelled, he stared up at the chandelier, the skin on his face trembled.

"It´s not so good," complained Chantille from the other end of the table. She made the same shrug and moue-thrust she always made when tasting a glass of wine, sometimes accompanied by a swiveling hand indicating "so-so," or "comme-ci, comme-ca."

Midnight came, everyone stood up and slowly circled the table, kissing each other on both cheeks. The men kissed each other but shook my hand. The college student to my right ignored my meaningful stare. I snapped myself out of it, gave a quick safe kiss. There are levels to the cheek kiss, ranging from the empty air kiss in the office to the contact cheek kiss to the suggestive one just outside the lips, which is the one Chantille then delivered to me.

We worked our way through the ground floor of the castle, moving to the next room, where another fire was underway. Yves broke out his guitar, played some Django Rinehart to show his skills and some sing-alongs that no one knew the words to in English, like Neil Young and Bob Dylan. His attention span limited him to fifteen-second morsels of each song, so that just as you were getting into it you were snapped out of it.

The kids and I retreated to a corner where we played a game in which you blow a small cork ball with puffs of air from a turkey baster to protect your goal. I wished my friend Rick was there, because it´s the kind of game we laugh wildly during, with all the ways you can blow the ball around.