The Beauty

The restaurant was Brazilian. I assume that the waitress was too. She was also stunningly beautiful, made all the more apparent by the way she hovered in the background and on the periphery of the action. She was something of an incongruity among the showy gimmickry of the rodizio, the waiters with their red kerchiefs and swords. Straight hair tied into a simple stroke that trailed from her authentic smile, she had a clean beauty with nothing artificial, nothing added. Just beauty. The only good thing about the meal. My only point of interest.

I was sitting in a corner of Pau Brasil, a restaurant in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I was there to enjoy a belated Christmas meal. At the back of the room, flames illuminated the darkness and burned away a few more millimetres from the chef’s eyebrows. He was an intense man, carefully entertaining each lump of meat before he skewered it to make another meat sword.

‘Meat sword’. It was one of the many jokes I wasn’t allowing myself to make tonight but there were so many. I was constantly tempted to say ‘nice meat’ in imitation of Austin Powers. And whenever a joint of beef caught fire, the chef would hit it with his spatula. Every comic instinct in my body wanted me to cry out that he was ‘beating his meat’. I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t. Enough people think I’m unusual as it is and I had spent the whole evening feeling odd and out of place.

I despise my occasional lapses into shyness. I detest feeling lost for words. I like to talk. I often talk too much. I love conversation, making people laugh, discussing difficult things or shared experiences. I like to hear people’s stories. Except there are times when I just withdraw. Like tonight. I sat and watched my colleagues enjoy all the red meat as one sword after the next was brought to the table and its contents carved or slid from the tip onto the plates. In front of each of us, there was a disk, green on one side and red on the other. The idea was to turn the disk over when you’d had enough meat. Mine had been turned over from the moment I’d got there. I was red all evening. I’ve been red all my life, or ever since I was a child and I discovered that I just don’t like red meat. Perhaps that explains my silence.

It was always going to be a disaster. A vegetarian doesn’t belong in a place famous for the 15 varieties of meat they serve in the course of a meal. The salad bar certainly wasn’t the draw and I wasn’t tempted to return to it after couple of new potatoes and few slices of beetroot. I knew I was never going to get the most out of my evening. I was glad I wasn’t paying. Instead, I made a few jokes as my colleagues slowly relaxed, got mildly tipsy, and began to make jokes of their own. The ‘funnier’ that they became, the less I tried to match them. I like the people and I liked being around them. But I was also out of place and I felt like I didn’t fit in. I don’t drink (I’d be a bad drunk and quick to form myself an addition) and I don’t eat meat. I find social dining difficult. An part I’ve not been trained to play. There are also very few common points of reference. I like films, comedy, books, cartoons, art and literature. And I like beautiful women. Like the silent waitress who cleared away the plates.

I did my best not to look at her. You might even say, ironic though it sounds, that I didn’t want to treat her like a piece of meat. But she was just too stunning for that. The only authentic experience of this whole evening. The only real sense I have of Brazil. A nation of too much meat and of significant beauty.