Peter Stjernström - The Best Book in the World

He tries to find good pictures that he can produce quickly to block the pathways where his brain starts to wander in the wrong direction. He flips through the slides of threat and reward images inside his head for a few minutes, picks the best and discards the rest. Finally he settles for two that he will use as and when required.

In one of the pictures, he is an adult man the size of a baby. He is lying on his mother’s bosom in what looks like a delivery room. His beard stubble has grazed one of her breasts so that it is pink under his chin. In his mouth he has a cigarette, and in his hand a large glass of whisky. His mother is crying violently and holding her nose.

In the other picture Titus is about twelve years old and as yet with no beard growth. He is lying with his head on the exposed bosom of a young woman, holding a book. You can’t see the young woman’s face but her nipples are stiff and goose-pimpled. Who is she? Titus has a white milk moustache on his lip and he is looking straight into the eyes of the observer, that is, Titus himself.

He switches between the two pictures. His craving diminishes. More and more details appear each time he pulls them out. Distinct or far too distinct? Who cares, Titus thinks. Cerebral images work. They must work! Work, work, work!

Better to be obsessed than dependent. Better to be obsessed than dependent. Better to be obsessed than dependent.

Food. Food, food, food. Food ! I’m hungry! Please, somebody, I must surely be allowed something to eat at least? FOOD, FOOD, FOOD!

Titus’ brain gets up speed. He charges out from the flat, runs down the stairs and out onto the street. Fresh air! A deep breath. Food! I must have some food! He looks around. Pizza! He rushes into the pizzeria on the corner and reads the menu. No specials now, Titus, it takes too long!

‘A Quattro, please!’

‘That’ll be fifteen minutes.’

‘It usually takes only ten!’

‘Okay, ten.’

‘Great, thanks.’

‘Eat here or take away?’

‘Eat here. Here and now.’

‘Help yourself to salad over there. Something to drink?’

‘A weak beer, please. No, no, no, not that! Water. I’ll have some water.’

Titus takes a helping of oily grated cabbage salad and sits at the bar counter in front of the pizza baker’s worktop. A little sheet of glass separates him from the various bowls with ingredients. He looks at the pizza guy, who whirls the round dough in the air. Pizza is tasty. In a sense, pizza is the mother of all cooked food. Tasty newly baked bread and various small yummy dishes on top. A portable smorgasbord in a hot portion-pack. Elegant and refined. Pizza must absolutely be given a star role in The Best Book in the World ! Especially Quattro Stagioni, the Rolls-Royce of pizzas. He must, quite simply, get hold of the perfect recipe for a Quattro and give it pride of place in the book. Perhaps the pizza recipe is the only recipe he needs to make the cookery book perfect? Let’s be honest, a cookery book doesn’t get any better just because it has lots of long and boring recipes, does it? Surely, it is the quality that counts. What more could you need than a single perfect recipe? And you can eat pizza for lunch as well as for dinner! And breakfast, if you’ve got some leftovers from your takeaway pizza. Isn’t that right? Exactly!

The Quattro can be the main character’s favourite dish, the one the master detective conjures up for his dinner guests and seduces long-legged ladies with. The cunning detective chief inspector’s Quattro is famed far and wide and now the secret recipe will be revealed once and for all in The Best Book in the World. The mother of all culinary dishes in the mother of all books!

Titus must immediately learn more about this wonderful dish! He turns to the pizza guy and asks: ‘Hello, is it true that Quattro Stagioni is named after Antonio Vivaldi’s piece?’

‘I don’t know, mister. Where does he work? Is that the Antonio at Melini on Kungsgatan? I wonder about that, you know he has only been in Sweden about fifteen years. I think Quattro was here before him. Long before. But I know it’s tasty, his Quattro, he uses real mozzarella from Palermo. That’s why it’s tasty. Mozzarella is tasty. And expensive. They charge forty-nine kronor for a Quattro there.’

‘No, I mean was it named after the Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s piece for violins?’

‘What do you mean, named? It is called Quattro Stagioni. That means the four seasons. It’s Italian. Pizza is Italian.’

Titus decides to drop the Vivaldi line of enquiry. There are other things to find out about. Lots of things. Who knows where the road leads when you get on with your research? When you have an unencumbered mind, you’ll discover things. I am unencumbered! Titus thinks. Obsessed, possibly, but above all unencumbered. He looks at the pizza guy who scatters small prawns over a quarter of the pizza.

‘Which season is that?’ says Titus, pointing at the prawns.

‘What?’ says the pizza guy, and their eyes meet for a second. What is this guy’s problem?

‘Yes, which season are the prawns?’

‘I don’t know,’ says the pizza guy, and thinks for a moment. ‘The summer, perhaps.’

‘Why?’ Titus wonders, surprised.

‘You know, summer and swimming in salt water and all that. There are, like, more prawns in the summer.’

‘Have you ever seen a prawn when you’ve been swimming?’

‘No, but why not? What do you think?’

‘I think prawns is autumn. Look how they twitch. They twist into themselves, sort of turn themselves off. As if they were suffering from an autumn depression. Suddenly an all-powerful being throws these sea creatures into an oven and dries them, slowly but surely. Just like us humans in the autumn. We are shut up inside our houses with boiling hot radiators that pour out regulated heat while we wither up and whimper. Yes, prawns could very well be autumn.’

‘All right, then, if prawns are autumn, then what are mushrooms?’ the pizza guy goes on, having now joined the match. ‘Mushrooms must be autumn, surely. Wild mushrooms are picked in the autumn. Not by me, I mean, but by people who pick mushrooms.’

‘Yes, damn it, of course you’re right about that,’ says Titus and puts his hand thoughtfully on his chin. ‘Okay, mushrooms are autumn and shrimps are summer. But what about the ham and mussels?’

The pizza guy laughs as he slides the peel under the pizza and loads it into the oven. ‘You are a funny one, mister. I have never thought about that before.’

‘So, what do you think? Aren’t mushrooms just as much summer as prawns?’

‘No, no. Mussels are women. Women are spring. When life awakens in the spring, it’s full of women. I know, we Italians love mussels. They open up in the spring. Like flowers that produce buds and then come into bloom, you know. Mussels are spring. The best season, that’s obvious’

‘Then ham must be winter. And that goes with Christmas ham and so on.’

‘Yes, perfect! We have solved the pizza mystery, mister.’

‘Have we? Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. It was easy!’

‘But we haven’t finished. The artichoke in the middle. What’s that then? It can’t be a fifth season. Is it the sun, perhaps?’

‘No, not the sun. It’s grey. A bit brownish, sort of. That’s no sun. The sun is yellow. Then there would have been a pepper.’

‘But what is it then?’ Titus wonders, sincerely worried by the mystery.

‘God, perhaps?’ the pizza guy hazards, and makes the sign of the cross on his white shirt.

‘Greyish-brown… yes, perhaps,’ says Titus, almost to himself. ‘An elderly man with a beard. Like in the pictures of God at primary school. Yes, perhaps it is God… who watches over the world…’