“All this stuff about wines and restaurants keeps me on the margins — everyone else wants to get into politics, be a councilor, an adviser, a deputy or a parliamentary hack,” he told me.
That’s what he said in the mid-1980s, once he’d got over his political fever. From the great illusion to the great opportunity. The times were in his favor. I doubt very much if we will see such a period of instability and social upheaval in many decades. And so Francisco Marsal did not go on to offer to an expectant humanity treatises on Marxist ethics, if such a discipline exists; or essays on the relationship between the political struggle and the class struggle, or the concept of citizenship in St. Paul and St. Augustine; nor the great novel he sometimes said he wanted to write (who doesn’t want to write a novel? I don’t, for one — I didn’t want to write novels, I didn’t want to be a sculptor, nor had I any desire to be a carpenter, still less work for my father — I wanted to live and yet I didn’t know what that meant: for me, living was screwing Leonor until I had screwed myself dry, having her there, at my disposal), no, he wrote articles on such insubstantial subjects as wine, food and travel. I’m not saying those subjects are in themselves insubstantial, Francisco wrote articles about wine and gastronomy, and it’s true that wine and food are important, of course they are: we are what we eat and drink. What’s so fragile about it is trying to capture in words something that vanishes and ceases to exist the moment it’s consumed, you can’t write or theorize about or try to hold on to such a non-communicable experience. The mystics wrote a lot about this. How, for example, do you describe ecstasy? Each bottle of wine is different. Each dish tastes different, even if you cook it using the same recipe. On one of his visits to Olba, he was soon proudly handing me a card: Vinofórum Francisco Marsal. Editor. He was no longer the young hack writing pieces about wine under the pseudonym Pinot Grigio (an ironic name, since he did not consider himself to be gray at alclass="underline" his articles fizzed with wit). The word “Editor” beneath the name of a prestigious magazine instilled respect — that was all in the late-1980s, when a food magazine was no longer a newsletter for restaurant owners, nor a recipe book for housewives, something suitable for a largely female public, but a product to be read by successful men looking for information about the expensive eateries that appeared in its pages, about which wines they should buy and where. They wanted to know how much they should pay and what social kudos they could gain from eating in a certain place or ordering a particular bottle of wine or a particular dish, because they now had access to anything they wanted, but (like bewildered children in a toy shop or candy store) they had still not yet learned how to behave in that world; they had to learn very quickly to differentiate themselves from the other waves of arrivistes coming up fast behind, who were equally eager to succeed and hungry for contact with what they believed would soon be their world, so that, when they did finally arrive, they would no longer have to behave like bewildered children. They wanted to know those things before they actually got them, they wanted to know their names, qualities and defects, know their price and their value, not so much their use value, but their exchange value, their image value, because the actual moment of tasting was of little importance, what mattered was the previous stage, adorning the table with those bottles, adorning themselves with those bottles and those tablecloths in those restaurants. We are not just what we eat, as the old philosophers said and as I myself had assumed; we are, above all, where we eat and with whom and how correctly we name the things that we eat, and correctly order the correct things from the menu and do so before witnesses, and we are, most especially, the person who then tells others what we ate and with whom. If you know all that about someone, you know precisely what kind of animal you’re dealing with. And how high he can fly. Whether he’s worth wasting fifteen minutes of your time on or buying him a drink and even arranging to meet for supper another night and establishing a relationship. Or whether, on the other hand, he’s the one eager to get into conversation with you and you’re the one making excuses, saying you’re late for a meeting and glancing at your watch before hurriedly making your escape, even though he wants to invite you to supper. And then there are those who gab on to you for half an hour about the virtues of a wine they’ve never tasted in their life or about a restaurant they’ll never visit. Francisco explained it to me: That’s what upstarts do; the first phase of ambition; the Genesis: In the beginning was the word. The word precedes being (or at least provides a temporary substitute, an Ersatz) — finding out from books and magazines what other people experience on a daily basis. Theory preceding empirical knowledge, the performative value of words as the first step up the ladder. All you had to say was “I want”—you say those words and everything’s set in motion. I didn’t dare. It seemed to me that Francisco had actually arrived somewhere, it didn’t matter where, and so I failed to realize that the job of editing the magazine didn’t use up enough of his energy or, more importantly, his ambition: he was on the road to somewhere else. He had moved on from standing in the pulpit as the apostle of wine and food to being the sleeping partner of the restaurant that Leonor ran right up until the end, and which was soon declared one of the country’s gastronomic temples: calling it a sanctuary rather than a temple would have been to devalue the perfection of Leonor’s croquettes, which were, in the words of restaurant critics, sublime: critics like to use such extravagant language; the four last things — death, judgment, hell or glory — to describe a Bearnaise sauce. That’s gourmands for you. A dish of