Rafael Chirbes - On the Edge

“Juanlu could have been anything he wanted, he could have been an Adrià or an Aduriz or like one of our more local chefs, a Dacosta, for example, but they all worked really hard to get where they were, and he didn’t want to work or wash dishes or peel potatoes or get blistered hands from the hot oil spitting out of the frying pan. Adrià peeled potatoes while he was doing his military service, in the barracks, not at a cookery school in Lausanne, and the rest, of course, is history. Juanlu could have been a celebrity chef, a writer of articles about wine and cookery, he could have studied at the best school in Lausanne or at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, with all the big shots in France: Besson, Robuchon, Guérard, Senderens, Trama. Leonor knew them all, and I knew them ten years before she did, when I started in the early eighties, when almost no one here had heard of them. Obviously, I wouldn’t expect you to know them, but for a gourmand, each of those names is what the Pope is for a Catholic, because gastronomy is polytheistic and doesn’t have only one God or only one Pope: cookery is, inevitably, materialistic, secular, a federal republic. They were all gods officiating in their respective temples, and they were all friends of mine and they all adored Leonor. I was offering my son a ready-made life; if he didn’t want to stay in Madrid after working in all those kitchens, he could go to Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai or Dubai and set up a restaurant in one of those up-and-coming cities if he wasn’t comfortable with more traditional locations; others have done so since, and now the dragons of the Orient enjoy the very finest cuisine, the big names are all eager to open a restaurant in one of those almond-eyed cities, because gourmet cooking goes where the money is.”

His cigarette was burning down between his fingers (he had left his cigar half-smoked in the ashtray); he was close to tears, not for his son, but for himself, because all his shady dealings would come to a full stop with him, and it’s really distressing to have done all those dubious things — well, let’s just say: the end justifies the means — in order to do others of which he was very proud, and for all of that to come to nothing, to fall into other people’s hands, to be wasted — after Leonor died, the Cristal de Maldón closed: a restaurant is its chef — he felt like crying, and I’m not sure what I felt like doing; perhaps telling him about the son who could have been born before Juanlu and who might have turned out to be a hard-working student, a skilled chef, the son who was just a little red ball that got flushed down the toilet when his wife pulled the chain in that apartment in Valencia.

The thing being disposed of was partial payment for her imminent overland trek away from Olba and toward her new life in Madrid: but how could you possibly believe I was going to stay here for ever. Such a promising future: a shotgun wedding, with all the women speculating: hmm, she must be knocked up, with the baby born five months later, and then an eternity of nothing stretching out before me for the rest of my life. You’re a bit late coming home tonight, love, you’ve probably been drinking with your pals in the bar and the rice is ruined. Never mind. Do you really see me in that role? You should know me better than that by now. Me, sobbing: But I love you and you said you loved me too. Leonor: People say all kinds of things when they’re fucking, but that doesn’t count. We’ve kept each other company in the desert and had a few good times together, that’s all. Did I ever promise you anything more than that? I’m leaving, and you should find some way of leaving here too and not waste your life in that shithole of a workshop, with a father who, forty years on, still believes we’re in the middle of a war and that the most interesting battle is yet to come.

That wasn’t the only time Francisco spoke to me in that complaining tone. This failed Francisco first confided in me a few days after he came back to settle here, having already arranged to buy the Civera house (he didn’t mention this to me at the time, not a word), he came to retire here like a humble peasant (our very own Josep Pla), and marked his return to the simple life by acquiring the best house in Olba, owned so long by the former lords of the village, and already had his yacht moored in the Marina Esmeralda a few yards from the terrace café where we met on subsequent occasions, and, again, I knew nothing about the existence of that yacht and he never mentioned it, because he used me — isn’t that what old friends are for? — as a shoulder to cry on, while, to others, he spoke only of his triumphs. That’s friendship for you. With me, he wanted admiration with a pinch of pity. He used to come and see me at the workshop, sit down on the other side of the polisher and speak of the joy of getting back to the simple life, trying to convince me how hard his working life had been: those free flights all over the world, tasting wines from Médoc and Burgundy, from South Africa, Australia and California, snoring the night away in five-star hotels, eating for free in Michelin-starred restaurants, and indulging in the usual energetic, lubricated pastimes that keep human beings entertained on all five continents. He would tell me about his sexual experiences with the natives and then, a couple of minutes later, his eyes would fill with tears and he would say how much he missed his wife, how disappointed he was in his son, how distant he felt from his daughter, and how much, over the years, he had missed us, we imbeciles who had stayed put in this village, scratching our asses, with no Atelier de Joël Robuchon, no Maison Troisgros, drinking wine from the local cooperative (which, a few years ago, bore no resemblance to today’s wine, three glasses of the stuff and you’d throw up), eating rice cooked in a thousand and one different ways — in the oven, as a risotto, in a paella, with a fish stock — as we have all our lives (the very recipes he’s collecting together for the book he’s writing — an encyclopedia of the food and cuisine of the region, over a thousand pages, part literature and part research — recording our customs just as anthropologists record the customs of the mountain peoples of Puerto Rico) and playing cards and dominoes in the evenings with the same bastards who have been screwing us over big time for the last fifty years, because Olba is a small village, which means that, when it comes to the theater of social life, this is a repertory company, with the same actors appearing in a variety of different plays. Today Othello, tomorrow Lear, the day after that Romeo, and if necessary, you put on a wig and play Lady Macbeth because the leading lady has come down with a sore throat. You see them in a bar and, a while later, in one of the other ten or twelve bars that exist in the village, you pass them in the street, meet them at the funerals of other locals and at bullfights; whether in their work clothes or in their Sunday best, they’re always the same people. True, in each place and on each occasion, they’re playing a different role. But they’re always, always the same people. And he wanted me to feel sorry for him . He complained that he was lonely, as if I had really struck it lucky living with Tutankhamun’s mummy, my father and comrade, who, years later, I would have to feed, dress and wash, the broken tamagotchi who neither laughs nor cries, and doesn’t even say Mama and Papa, as even the cheapest made-in-China doll will do. He wanted me to feel sorry for him, this man who, thirty years ago, used to tell me about that restaurant built on undeclared money given to him by a brother-in-law in some high government position, and would talk me through the script of the get-rich-quick years in which he played an active role, the golden days of Miguel Boyer and Carlos Solchaga, the happy times when — according to the then social-democrat minister for the economy — Spain was the country in Europe where you could get rich quickest. I was filled with a mixture of anger, scorn and envy, and yet I would laugh and say: No, Spain is the country in Europe where some people, like you and your friends, can get rich quickest, because the workshop is having a really hard time of it (the late 1980s were disastrous for the region, the World Expo in Seville — Spain’s biggest ever urban building project, he would say excitedly — and the Olympics in Barcelona swallowed all the available public and private capital and stole all the tourists: workers here started emigrating again, like in the 1950s, because, in Spain, all the money flowed down those two great drains: Seville, such a wonderful place, and Barcelona, bona si la bossa sona —good as long as there’s money in the purse). In my house — that’s how he referred to the restaurant: my house, it was fashionable to do so at the time, famous chefs did the same in any newspaper interviews they gave: in our house we eat, in our house we only serve — in his house, he had only the best; the vice-president had moved into an apartment in the same building as the restaurant and dined there most nights. Anyone who wanted to do any kind of deal by, with or for the government, and always at the government’s expense, had to be seen at the Cristal de Maldón, it was a real gold mine, they had it all worked out. And then there was that business created with money from ICEX, the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade, to promote and export Spanish products throughout the world, a front for getting subsidies that were shared for eight or ten years with a Secretary of State who had placed his wife in charge of the institute, and this was quite apart from the wine and hotel scams he was involved in and his position in that powerful publishing group. But here we are in Bar Castañer, talking about this and that, so as to avoid talking about what really matters, and I speak out in defense of Tomás Pedrós, as a form of self-defense and also to see if I can, once and for all, finish off the subject: