a desalambrar, a desalambrar, dale tu mano al indio, dale que te hará bien—and this was a real going out into the world, not spending your life shuffling around gloomy sacristies, dark corridors and damp offices full of crucifixes and paintings of martyred or wounded saints, pale as boiled chard, darkened by hundreds of years of exposure to the smoke of candles that appeared to be made of the same yellowish substance as the faces inhabiting those rooms, places on the very borders of the dread continent of eschatology: a narrow frontier where the living merge with the dead, down a path between today’s shadows and the deep abyss of the shadows waiting for us just around the corner. Although, in reality, as long as he remained involved in politics — or, later on, in his professional life as a writer or businessman or whatever he was — he still appeared to behave like a priest, and showed a definite penchant for secret meetings and behind-the-scenes scheming: he carefully hid the tips of his fingers when he was pulling the strings, a born operator, that was what his fellow party members called him: he showed his eyes, full of convincing, encouraging fire; his lips, from which proclamations issued forth; his chest which filled with air when he was about to bellow out the relevant slogan, but he always hid his nimble hands, capable of pulling dozens of different strings at once. He would tell me all this with great amusement, proud of his own deviousness. It was quite safe to tell me; after all, I knew no one to whom I could pass on the information. His taste for intrigue has never left him: when he abandoned politics, he went on to manipulate a number of winery owners from behind the tasting tables, because the price of their wines depended in large measure on the points awarded them by Vinofórum, the magazine he ended up editing, having stabbed a few rivals in the back, rivals who, it seems — at least according to him — resisted with unusual ferocity, resorting to an email war, sending the then editor reports linking Francisco to all those wineries who were paying him for his services, and with whom he, with jesuitical sangfroid, denied ever having had any contact (it’s a specialty of his correligionists, whether religious or political, to do the opposite of what they say, and not to let the left hand they’re showing know what their thieving right hand is up to); from the dark den of the magazine’s office in which he had taken refuge as a fugitive from political intrigues, he rose as inexorably as a bubble in a glass of champagne, until he reached a prominent position on the board of the editorial group (the surface of the champagne, from which one can see — as if from a high-angle camera — the other bubbles rising up from below: the office was on the thirtysomethingth floor of a skyscraper in Madrid’s elegant Paseo de la Castellana), producing magazines, wine guides, publications about hotels and restaurants, a couple of monthly travel magazines (one for upscale clients and another for downmarket clients: on the cover of the former the ten best hotels in the world; on the latter the ten best-value campsites on the Costa Dorada), as well as a stake in various hotel chains and wine and spirits distributors. He told me about this on his visits to Olba, much as Stanley would tell his friends about his journey into darkest Africa. An exciting adventure. From there — and more to amuse himself than anything — he was at liberty to raise up to the skies or trample into the mud the faithful legions of chefs, who would distribute his photo among waiters and waitresses, who had been given express orders to raise the alarm the moment Francisco crossed the threshold: take a good look at this bastard and remember his face. As soon as he appears, tell me, we don’t want to let him escape (chefs weren’t exactly stars then, this was an earlier phase, when, as restauranteur Arzak said, chefs were just beginning to merit the same respect as engineers, architects and doctors). The chefs — like men on a Gothic altarpiece condemned to the fires of hell, surrounded by flames and prodded by a legion of kitchen boys in the guise of dark devils — scurried about among saucepans and ovens whenever the head waiter appeared in the kitchen to announce that the critic, Francisco Marsal, formerly known as Pinot Grigio, had just walked into the restaurant. He extorted money from oenologists who would work themselves to death experimenting with Merlots, Syrahs and Viogniers, foreign stock in which he believed and which he had recommended, assuring the oenologists that he would back them all the way in their experiments. You’ll get a ninety-three at the tasting table. Guaranteed. With a bit of luck, three or four points more. That would put you up there among the very best. It’s your choice whether you want to accept the offer. Afterward, they might or might not get a ninety-three: they would have to hold further discussions about the fine print, talk actual numbers, and then there were the ads in the magazines belonging to the group, the confidential contract to design their publicity campaign, including fold-out brochures and labels, establishing the all-important philosophy of the wine, and all this began with a suggestion that they change the original oenologist for another man who the publishing company was interested in turning into a media figure, following his appointment to a big consortium for a wine and spirits distributor with which the magazine had a close relationship, and which was, in fact, one of its main sources of finance. Francisco’s articles in the group’s magazines, his carefully honed “letters from the editor,” his judgments at tastings, all had quite a lot to do with consolidating the prestige of what are now some of the most expensive wineries. And he succeeded in transforming his wife from a cook who’d opened a small restaurant simply to stave off boredom into a gastronomic star: four tables and an oven, they said modestly when they came to Olba shortly before the restaurant opened in Madrid (I think that was the last time she came with him), something very simple, rather like those small bourgeois restaurants of yesteryear. I wish you’d come and see it, promise me you will, Francisco said, knowing that I would never dream of doing so. To start with, I had no suit, no tie. I had nothing that would satisfy the dress codes of the new age. Leonor sat silently beside him, as if we only knew each other by sight. Soon afterward, she was saying that standing in front of an oven in the restaurant was just an extension of her role as housewife, that’s what she said in the interviews her husband arranged for her in the color pages of the Sunday papers, while he traveled the world training his nose and taste buds on Burgundies, Rhine wines and Moselles. (I don’t know how you can taste anything. Your sense of smell must be completely fucked by all that cocaine. Don’t exaggerate, I only snort it once in a blue moon, when I come here, just so that I can switch off from everything and talk to you, ah, yes, the good old days.) And the crepinettes flavored with Piedmontese truffles, the Kobe beef carpaccio, and filling the cunts of five continents with whipped cream — specialty of the house. The housewife in her modest restaurant with just half a dozen tables became the first Spanish woman to be awarded two Michelin stars, as well as garnering the highest number of points in all the food guides, including the one published by Vinofórum. But she’s no longer here, and the stars she was so proud of have burned out, and her widower husband gently places his three of clubs on the table and says: