The older Francisco despises Olba’s petits vices, he wouldn’t sink that low, just the occasional gin and tonic made with Bombay Sapphire or Citadelle gin, which the owner of the Bar Castañer reserves for him. He keeps two bottles on the shelf just for Francisco, who is the only one who’d ever think of asking for either. Other customers order a Larios or a Gordon’s, or, for more fanciful ones, a Tanqueray. Francisco asks for a Citadelle gin and tonic, easy on the gin, purely for medicinal purposes, you understand, to relieve the treacherous drop in blood pressure that occurs each evening, his hypoglycemia, but he never goes in for any heavy drinking. Poker, prostitutes, gambling and drugs are out: he wrinkles his small, decrepit rabbit nose when he hears comments from the other old men (whores, gambling) or from the young men (lines of coke, a joint: marijuana grows well in these sunny climes, young people grow their own, half a dozen plants in the backyard or up on the roof), because, one assumes, he has better things to do, or the same things on a different, but higher level — yes, only the best, far removed from what’s on offer in some pokey room complete with a Romanian whore who has removed any body hair with a razor or with wax because she hasn’t yet heard about laser technology or perhaps can’t afford it; rooms equipped with a toy jacuzzi. I always wonder how those jacuzzis can possibly hold the great carcasses propping up the bar at the Lovely Ladies club, men weighing in at two hundred, two twenty, two hundred and fifty pounds or more, strapping farmers, burly bricklayers, obese truck drivers and mechanics, sedentary real estate agents or bank clerks, asses of all dimensions, fat, soft and low-slung, men with wide hips, who rock from side to side when they walk, like the clapper in a bell. The Mediterranean amphora-shape which one always thought of as female has become unisex. I know many a whoremonger with wide hips, but have no idea why that should be. I can’t imagine those carcasses fitting in one of those mini-jacuzzis. I only just fit. Instead of splashing about in the pool with all those high-pressure jets, they presumably crouch over the bidet as I do when I visit, mounted on the pony (isn’t that what the French word means, a small horse? I’ll have to look it up in the French dictionary I’ve kept from my schooldays) while she scrubs your bottom and your asshole with antiparasitic soap to flush out any lice hiding inside; the pool-cum-jacuzzi is pure decoration to bump up the price of the session, an illusion of luxury that even the starving can afford. You pay for it, it’s there, but it’s so difficult to use that you give it up as a lost cause. Another time, you say, next time, or in the next few months, when I’ve lost a bit of weight on the diet the doctor has put me on to lower my cholesterol levels and triglycerides. He said I have to lose nearly thirty pounds and eat a lot of grilled chicken breasts and salads, otherwise, he said, my arteries and my heart will explode like a well-stuffed piñata. Anyway, I came here to fuck not to have a bath. I can do that at home. No, Francisco doesn’t go to places like that. In Olba one bad move is all it takes to tarnish your image, if you lose your name and reputation, you can never get it back, your picture remains sullied forever; my childhood friend, our local celebrity: while we were drinking wine from the local Misent cooperative and ordering paellas at some open-air café, he was working as a journalist in Madrid, for a national magazine,
Vinofórum, as well as being a co-owner of a trendy restaurant. His wife was nominally the owner (on marriage they had opted for separation of property just in case) and, thanks to a few Castilian businessmen in Salamanca and Valladolid, he was a partner in a couple of boutique wine hotels, selling vinos de pago—that’s what they call them, not that they’re so expensive, but because it’s the lame-ass translation of what the French call cru, domain or estate: pago is a would-be medieval word and, believe me, he would say, there are still plenty of medieval Franquistas in this wretched country of ours — and he would talk to me, too, about the slopes of Burgundy and Corton-Charlemagne, which produce white wines because the emperor was fair-haired and red wine stained his beard; and about Romanée-Conti, Médoc and Château Latour. He would explain the virtues of botrytis cinerea, the gray mold used to sweeten the wines of Sauternes; and he would lecture me about the decantation time required by each wine, on which he was an expert, as well as being a writer of cook books and articles and travelogues. He was no longer interested in St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and the Thessalonians, nor in the ideas of the lay theologian Enrique Miret Magdalena; and he couldn’t care less about the Second Vatican Council and didn’t even remember it had existed (when was that? in the far-off sixties) or about Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, whose books he used to read a few years ago, indeed, we spent many nights discussing their ideas. Long before that, he used to tell me about St. Paul, although, to be honest, I was never a believer, I slightly preferred — although not by much — those German revolutionaries: they had more interesting adventures, although I was always bored by the political vein running through their various trials and tribulations; that was more my father’s territory. Francisco would have enjoyed debating with him, had my father ever agreed to such a debate, but he could never forgive Francisco for being his father’s son, and I’ve always been allergic to heroes and saints, feeling incapable of following their example, but Francisco and I used to talk about all those things, not just here, but in Paris and London and Ibiza during the months of my great escape, my Indian summer that ended with me caught in Leonor’s web. Then came those forty long years of winter. Those people from the German Weimar Republic were like family to Francisco (he had aligned himself with some really fine specimens that would have delighted his hunter father Gregorio Marsal), and the landscapes were familiar, the frozen canal into which Rosa Luxemburg was thrown by her social democrat comrades. Indeed, we knew more about their trials and tribulations than we did about those suffered by our grandparents. I had been given certain hints about how my grandfather met his end, although only in the vaguest of terms, I still knew nothing about the bullet in the back of the neck administered just a few hundred yards from our house, but I knew about the bodies of revolutionaries floating in the icy waters of the River Spree (whenever anyone mentions crime and Germany, there’s always night and fog and the waters have to be icy: even Marx in the