Me:
“Just think how hard our mothers had to struggle to disguise a poverty there was no way of disguising, and which everyone knew about anyway.” My words sound almost like an insult. Did Francisco’s mother struggle? Did Bernal’s? They were definitely caught up in a war, but a different war, or, rather, they were on a different side with different objectives. “But now it’s the opposite. If you’re not completely destitute, you’re nobody; if you’re not the victim of some domestic tragedy: a violent husband, a child with some rare disease, a foreclosure notice”—I try not to look at Carlos—“you’re nobody. It’s the only way people can get anyone to notice them. These days, who wasn’t raped by their father or their grandfather? Even high-class writers talk about it in their books. Yeah, my grandpa used to stick it up me. Well, that never happened before. I don’t know anyone of my generation who was screwed by his or her own grandfather. All right, the priests used to touch us sometimes and fondle the altarboys, especially in boarding schools. You were at boarding school, Francisco, and you’ve talked about it sometimes, but we took it all as a bit of a joke, not an emotional trauma: you mean, you let Don Domingo handle your little dick, you big faggot.”
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.”