As he drew near the door of their holiday apartment, he could hear movement inside. Was Corine nosing around his things again? He tiptoed closer and opened the door a crack. The first thing he saw in the soft light was Simone’s origami seabird lying on the floor a few steps away. He pushed the door wide open. Sébastien, who had his back to the door, turned his head sharply, flushed, and did his best to preserve the modesty of the woman whose naked posterior he was giving a good seeing-to over the kitchenette table.
Joaquin averted his eyes in a flush of embarrassment of his own and avoided looking at the woman, whom he certainly did not want to identify. He tried to make a hasty exit, but was encumbered by his jacket, holster and weapon. In one swift movement, he bent down, put it all on the floor – the revolver and its holster with the jacket over the top – and gently picked up the origami creation before leaving the room, closing behind him a door he would rather not have opened.
When Sébastien was a teenager, he used to tell everyone he wanted to be a police officer. Then one day, he changed his mind. One day, children start to talk about things their parents can’t even begin to understand, embrace values different to their own and make choices that leave those of the older generation scratching their heads and feeling like strangers.
Joaquin was rinsing the vegetables when his son walked into the kitchen.
‘Dad…’
‘Is that what you call a culinary experiment?’
Moralès was clumsily trying to unwrap the fish. He walked out of the kitchen. He wasn’t going to be able to cook in this state. He strode over to the bar and returned with a bottle of rum. Rum wouldn’t have been his first choice, but the tequila wasn’t up to his standards. He poured two glasses and put them on the counter. One he knocked straight back. He didn’t touch the other, but didn’t invite Sébastien to drink it either.
‘When you choose a woman, you condense into her the beauty of all the others – all their delicate touches, all their sensual movements, all their perfection. That’s the only way to love.’
Joaquin turned away, rinsed the fish, sliced the fillets. Sébastien drizzled oil into a pan and put it on the burner, then took the knife and cut the green onions and jalapeño and sent them sizzling into the hot oil. Behind them, Joaquin heard the front door open and close, and guessed his son’s guest had just left. He took a generous pinch of spice and sprinkled it on top of the onions.
‘And when you’re cooking the sea, you put everything in the same pan – the onions, the salt, the flavours, the memories, the doubts, the good times and the bad, the strong spices and the ones that cost too much, the herbs and the fiery peppers.’
In a show of defiance, Sébastien grabbed a kiwi, sliced it in two and tossed it into the pan. He did the same with the second kiwi.
‘Like that?’
Joaquin clenched his teeth. ‘En la madre!’
He wasn’t sure what sickened him the most: his son’s cheating on his partner on his work surface, or his insistence on concocting dishes devoid of flavour. He felt guilty that he hadn’t found the right questions to ask Sébastien, and had to resort to using other people’s words to talk to him – Lefebvre’s, and those of the grandmother who taught Joaquin to cook when he was a boy. Sébastien took the lid off the blender and poured the questionable contents of the pan right into it. Then he tossed in everything else he could see on the counter – lime juice, fresh coriander and hot sauce. He looked at his father with an air of defiance.
‘Maude’s pregnant.’
Sébastien abruptly turned the blender on, invading the kitchen with a noise as unbearable as a child’s annoying toy. Joaquin reclaimed the pan, put it back on the heat and gently added two of the fillets with a drizzle of oil. Sébastien turned off the blender.
‘When your mother was pregnant with you, I left my country to be with her. And you, when your partner’s expecting your child, what do you do? You act like a stroppy teenager and run away!’
Joaquin left it at that. His words were leaving him short of breath.
Sébastien grabbed the red cabbage, looked his father in the eye and plunged the knife in deep. ‘It’s not mine.’
He pushed the blade down and made short work of chopping the cabbage first into quarters, then fine strips. Joaquin could feel his knees starting to give way. The fish was sizzling in the oil, filling the kitchen with its aroma.
‘The first time she cheated on me, we were eighteen.’
Sébastien picked up the tongs and turned the fish his father had left sizzling in the pan. He put a cast-iron plate over another burner and turned it on to heat, then set the cabbage to one side, reached for the dough, gave it a quick knead, and divided it. He rolled out the first tortilla and placed it calmly on the hotplate.
‘She’s cheated on me a lot. With I don’t know how many other guys. She does it all the time. I thought she’d get fed up of it. But she hasn’t. And you know what? At some point, I just got used to it.’
The dough was swelling and writhing in the heat. Sébastien flipped the tortilla before it burned and transferred the chopped cabbage to a bowl. He rolled out more tortillas and cooked them one by one. Joaquin pulled himself together and went back to frying the fish. One by one. That was all he could bring himself to do, stack one fried fillet on top of the last. And he listened, because he couldn’t not hear.
‘When she told me she was pregnant, I didn’t know if the baby was mine. Still, I told her if she wanted to keep it, I was willing to take responsibility. To be the father. She said she needed to think about it. So I got in the car and drove, to give us time to think. I didn’t bring anything with me, just my pots and pans really, and most of those came from you anyway. I thought that talking to you would help me understand. But on the way here, I got drunk. Then I started to dance, I took up fishing, and I don’t know why, but I…’ He gestured upstairs, to where he had been with the other woman.
Joaquin took the last fillet out of the pan, put it with the others and turned off the stove.
‘That’s what you’ve always done – invested yourself in one thing and made everything fit around it,’ Sébastien said. ‘You live your life the same way you do your cooking. You throw everything into your investigations, your relationship and your kids. But sometimes, something’s got to give, because you can’t do it anymore. And that’s what’s happened to me. I can’t do this anymore.’
Joaquin wished he were drinking tequila, listening to music too loud and fishing with Cyrille. He wanted to be able to console his son, but all he could manage to do was put the pan in the sink and fill it with soapy water. Sébastien flinched as he felt the phone vibrate in his jeans pocket. He grabbed it and handed it to his father.
‘It’s her. She won’t stop texting me. She wants to know where I am, what I’m doing, if I’ve met another woman. She says she’s going to make up her mind soon.’
Joaquin took the device, not so much to look at it as to take it off his son’s hands while he finished cooking the tortillas.
‘What’s your code?’
Sébastien took the lid off the blender and poured the curious kiwi salsa into a bowl. ‘Maude. The five letters of her name.’
Joaquin tapped them in.
‘She had an ultrasound yesterday. At thirteen weeks and four days. She was at a conference in Dallas at the time of conception.’
Moralès couldn’t stop the phone vibrating in his hand. It made him feel old. Old and ridiculous.
‘There’s just one thing that’s been running through my mind since the day I left, though. Do you know what that is?’ Distraught, he looked at his father. ‘Your loyalty.’