Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

Justino:

“If poor families remember the past, it’s with feelings of profound shame.” He knows what he’s talking about, he’s from humble beginnings like me. “A whole catalogue of horrors: eating cats, dogs, rats, potato peelings, rotten melons, maggoty meat. That’s what our parents did. Worse than that, they starved. In those museums of memory you find in other countries, they never include a CD with a recording of the rumbling from someone’s starving innards or the meowing of a cat rising up from the depths of a shrunken stomach. Has anyone ever been taught to listen for that music? No, the background music is always Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach, or, at most, some ballad taken out of context or García Lorca’s ‘The Four Muleteers’ or the old national anthem. Never any meowing.”

Carlos:

“Sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to tell you that Laura,” his wife, that is, “is pregnant. It’s a boy and he’s due in April. I’m going to be a father.” Smiles, glasses raised in a toast. “Esteban, you’re the only one who hasn’t taken the plunge yet. It’s still not too late. Andrés Segovia had a child when he was in his eighties, and I think Julio Iglesias’ father kept reproducing until quite late in life.”

“Well, it’s good to know that Carlos has finally reached the chapter on sex ed in his Citizenship course and has been doing the exercises,” says Justino mockingly. “We all learned more or less the same kind of thing, but we did it behind a wall and under our own steam.”

The little monk from the bank, who is leaving half the village homeless because they haven’t kept up their mortgage repayments, has just called me a eunuch. I hope he’s not going to add that I’m also a bankrupt. Francisco says nothing, indicating by his silence that this conversation is beneath him. I keep talking. Better to talk about sex than about Pedrós’s (and my) bankruptcy:

“The very idea of sex education is so weird, as if you could teach sex, as if it could be controlled and wasn’t always a restless, untamable thing. I don’t know why people describe it as a source of pleasure. They’re lying and they know it. If someone says he wants to screw you or give it to you up the ass, he isn’t telling you he wants to give you pleasure. If someone asks you to pick up the soap for them, expect the worst.”

Now and then, when he waxes sentimental, Francisco says that I’ve been lucky to have spent my life here, in the workshop:

“You’ve had a quiet life, and I envy you. Twenty or thirty years ago I couldn’t understand your decision to stay here, but now I’m convinced that you made the better choice. John Huston used to say something along the lines of blessed are those who have never had more than one town, one god and one house. I’ve traipsed all over the world and generally taken an interest in what’s happening on the planet, but what have I ended up with? Nothing. I’m all alone. The Fates carried off Leonor, and Juanlu”—your son, the wretched child Leonor did want to have and that wasn’t mine—“has set himself up in some business or other and about which I know nothing, and Luisa, my daughter spends her time glued to her computer screen, watching the ups and downs of the stock market. My son would complain whenever I took an interest in his affairs: leave me alone, I can’t stand you trying to manage my life, when you’ve always done exactly what you wanted. That’s my son talking. Anyway, I took him at his word. I don’t give a moment’s thought to his future now. He hated the fact that his mother wanted to leave him a flourishing restaurant at the top of its game; or, if he’d wanted, he could have carried on the business under my hard-earned name, because, I don’t want to boast, but it’s a highly respected name in the world of restaurants and the gastronomic press, in the gourmet food and wine trade; he could have had a nice fat bank balance and the chance to borrow whatever he needed to set himself up on his own. But he didn’t want that, and now here I am all on my lonesome.”

He complains because he has no one to whom he can bequeath all his hard work, which will die with him. In a hundred years’ time, no one will appear on the TV or in the press declaring: I am the fifth generation of the Marsal family, the gastronomic dynasty founded by my great-great-grandfather. The poor thing, alone on his yacht, a Robinson Crusoe adrift on a small island, as small as one of those deceptive clumps of vegetation you find floating in the marsh; alone in his mansion, a monk spending each night in his Trappist cell; a Tuareg nomad riding his BMW through the infinite desert of indifference. Ridiculous. Yes, I actually saw Francisco’s eyes welling up with tears — true, he was a bit drunk — it was not many months ago, on the terrace of a bar in Marina Esmeralda, where we sat perched on uncomfortable minimalist chairs next to a palm tree on the quayside (the water in that harbor isn’t exactly emerald green, by the way; at night, under the spotlights, it’s more a dazzling mixture of phosphorescent yellows, poisonous greens and neon blues: the debris from oil, fuel, sun tan lotion and detergent: it should really be called the Marina Química or Marina Kuwait); the masts silhouetted against the sky beneath the waxing (or was it waning?) moon, are traditional wooden masts, even though they’re harder to maintain; no aluminum, no carbon fiber.

“We must cling to the few principles we have left. Paella rice must have that golden caramelized crust at the bottom we call socarrat; foie gras and truffles must come from Périgord; and vinegar from Módena.” He’s joking now. “The new principles, the last thing we have to hold on to, serve to help us choose good wine, wooden masts for our yachts and ammunition for our hunting trips. That’s what ethics and aesthetics comes down to now, and as we know, they tend to be one and the same. Your ethics are the suit you wear, the shoes you put on, the wine you drink, and whether you choose freshly caught fish or a slice of frozen halibut caught in some godforsaken place surrounded by glaciers. Wood is ethical and aesthetic”—thanks for the compliment, Francisco—“and glass fiber is unaesthetic and unethical. Times have changed.”

Of course times have changed, Francisco. Life is constantly changing, it is change. It has no other purpose but to change and to keep changing, the Greeks knew this and I imagine even their ancestors knew it too, you never bathe twice in the same stream, you don’t even bathe the same body, today there’s a pimple that didn’t exist yesterday, nor did this varicose vein which, for long hours, has been making its way to the surface, or this sore in my groin or on the sole of my foot, and which my hyperglycemia won’t allow to heal; they are all lying, those utopians who say that this troubled life of avarice and lust will be succeeded by a peaceful world in which we will all be brothers, and where, as in the Golden Age Don Quixote described, we will, in a spirit of fraternal love, dine on a shared meal of acorns. There is no heavenly peace possible beneath the sheltering sky, only a permanent state of war in which everyone is pitched against everyone and everything against everything. The problem is that with so much change, everything somehow ends up pretty much the same. Francisco sobbed — my life, a failure. The things you say when you’ve had a few too many. But what do you expect your life to be when you’re about to turn or have turned seventy? A failure of course. Irremediably so? Yes. Today is worse than yesterday, but better than tomorrow. Such are the diary entries of a seventy-something. Leonor Gelabert triumphed, because the only triumph is to die a timely death, or had you forgotten? Those whom the gods love die young. She got where she was through sheer hard work, she never doubted for a moment that the end justifies the means, a principle attributed to the Jesuits, but which I’m sure the ancestors of the Greeks knew about too, the means, what you have to do, the bitter pills you have to swallow, but also what you have to sacrifice, the things you have to discard, even if that involves giving them a good kick: a carpenter with too good a memory, a small red globular thing that gets flushed down the toilet, are, were, part of her purification process, stages on her ascent of the culinary and social Mount Carmel. If someone were to write a well-documented biography of her, the biographer would speak of sacrifices, of the painful decisions she had to make, her rigorous asceticism when it came to achieving perfection in the kitchen and, thanks to all those sacrifices and renunciations, her moment of plenitude. She was lucky enough to die up there on the heights, not like us egoists and cowards: even though our moment of plenitude is long since past, we stubbornly go on living, it somehow never seems a good moment to disappear, we pretend not to have reached the place where the only way is down, and then we complain about our declining health, our miserable life, our medicalized, chemically assisted survival: pills, serums, drainage tubes, nasal cannula, a catheter up your cock. We snivel on about it. But what did you expect? That your cock would still keep growing at seventy? That you would win a triathlon? Leonor was struck down by lightning on the very summit of the mountain, an enviable scenario, although, since, in life, things rarely go quite according to plan, her final chapter lasted far too long, chemotherapy, repellently high doses of poisons, vomiting fits, you told me all the details, her hair coming out in clumps in her hands, her nails coming away from the skin, her body covered in black marks, her tongue and the roof of her mouth broken out in sores, and she got very little joy out of that irritating rash or boil that was her son. While I’m talking to Francisco, I’m thinking to myself: the chef she had inside her was probably flushed down the toilet. Her first child proved useless, or, rather, her second child, manufactured or, rather, uterized by the factory that was, she said, her sole responsibility — I’m not telling you again: this has nothing to do with you, it’s my problem, so just leave me in peace. You don’t have to do anything or accompany me anywhere. Subject closed. But there she was at all the panel discussions about haute cuisine, at gastronomic summit meetings, not just here, but in San Sebastián, Barcelona, Copenhagen and New York. Especially after she was awarded that second Michelin star, our chef’s career really took off or, as her husband would say, rocketed. Student chefs, or those simply wanting to improve their technique, would put their names down on a waiting list years in advance just to have the chance of serving an apprenticeship with her; the children of the filthy rich and the children of parents who were in the arts or politics would try to wangle letters of introduction to get their child a job as a mere dishwasher at the restaurant, and yet, as it turned out, the Marsal-Gelabert couple’s first brat, who had all those things within his grasp from the day he was born, loathed both the profession and the world of restaurants. Millionaires were willing to pay a fortune to get their boy in, and once in, he would keep one eye on the potatoes he peeled, the onions he chopped and the trashcan he wheeled back and forth, and the other on Leonor’s amazing hands, which knew how to put the finishing touch to a plate, checking the garnish, adding a few thyme leaves, or leaving the dish under the grill just the few seconds longer it takes to achieve the perfect gratiné effect, the gastronomic miracle.