Chronicle & Humour: Bernard, the Chili, and the Cambodia That Never Burns Hot Enough
The tigers let him down, the monkeys robbed him. But Bernard has found a new territory to conquer, and this one, he promises, will not betray him: chili.
Ever since the Phnom Tamao episode, which he no longer mentions, Bernard has shelved his gift for animals and discovered another, safer, more intimate one: the palate. “Chili, to me, is seasoning,” he announces at the bar, in the tone of a man stating a scientific fact.
The clinching argument is seniority. Eight years. Eight years of eating Cambodian, or at least of eating next to people who eat Cambodian. In his mind, those eight years have remade his tongue at the cellular level, tanned it and Cambodianised it. He no longer feels entirely barang about the mouth. “My palate,” he says, tapping his cheek, “has a passport.”
Sophea, who once saw him weep over a bowl of bai sach chrouk that was a touch too peppery, says nothing. Sophea nods.
One lunchtime, she takes him to eat with her family — well, at the roadside num banh chok stall her grandmother runs. Yiey. Past eighty, one metre forty, a three-toothed smile, and hands that have not stopped pounding kroeung since Sihanouk’s first reign. In front of her, a small pile of chilies. Real ones. The tiny kind. The ones you bite into knowing exactly what you’re doing.
Yiey swallows one, raw, like a peanut, between two sentences, without blinking. Then another. Bernard watches and feels the gift — sorry, the palate — start to itch.
“Go on,” he tells Sophea. “The real thing. Like hers. Prahok, kroeung, everything. Not the tourist version.”
The bowl arrives. Red. A red with nothing appetising about it and everything of a warning, the prahok on top, with that forthright smell that splits humanity into two camps. Beside him, Yiey adds three more chilies to her own, out of habit, without even looking at it.
The first mouthful goes down. A second of silence. Then the chili arrives — not just in the mouth, but further, everywhere at once, like news spreading from house to house. Bernard’s forehead breaks out in constellations. One drop, then two, then a personal rainy season.
But Bernard does not flinch. Because to flinch would be to lose. And to lose in front of Sophea, in front of Yiey, in front of the entire road — never. He sets his spoon down with a steely calm. “Hmm,” he says, his voice up half a tone. “It’s… mild.”
Water would be a confession. He doesn’t touch it. Beer does nothing against chili — everyone knows this, except hope — but he drinks it anyway, because beer, at least, doesn’t look like surrender. He eats. All of it. Spoonful after spoonful, a hero, a stoic, a statue, scarlet and streaming, a man scaling his inner Everest with the fixed smile of a condemned man who cares about his dignity.
Yiey finishes her third bowl, wipes her hands, and goes off for a nap. She did not take part. There was never a contest. Bernard’s only opponent was Bernard.
He finishes. He sets down the spoon. He has won a battle no one else was fighting. He straightens up, an exhausted victor, and declares to the room, in a voice he means to sound sovereign: “There. Chili. It’s just a matter of habit.”
And that is when Sophea, kindly, to congratulate him, translates what Yiey slipped to the cook earlier, before she left.
“She asked them to make you the mild one. For the gentleman. She said you have to be careful with barang, they’ve got fragile palates.”
A silence.
“The mild one.”
“She likes you,” Sophea adds. “She didn’t want to be rough on you.”
Bernard says nothing. Bernard, for the second time in two stories, has nothing. He has just endured martyrdom, a hero, a statue — over the version made for children and cautious tourists. Somewhere, in a kitchen, there exists a hot version — the real one, Yiey’s — that he will never reach, and next to which his ordeal was a mere appetiser.
He heads back to the bar. He tells nobody anything. He orders a beer, then another. And when a customer brings up his famous passport-holding palate, Bernard waves a hand through the air.
“Chili,” he says, “is overrated.”
And the next morning, at dawn, in the privacy that a certain decency requires us not to describe, Cambodia reminded him one last time, and insistently, that he had after all eaten only the mild version.
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