“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 all: 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 bacalao al pilpil can send them straight up to heaven, the lucky souls. I read Francisco’s articles in the Sunday papers, again following in his footsteps, pursuing him, watching him. Leonor’s bacalao, woodcock cooked à la Leonor, ah, yes, la bécasse, Leonor’s bécasse. I know that, over time, her enemies began to call her La Bécasse, as her thin face and pointed nose grew sharper, her anorexia became more marked, first signs of the illness eating away at her flesh. I read about that in a newspaper article. Francisco told me that customers from as far away as the Basque country would come to eat there: every lunchtime, a dozen or so politicians and financiers would gather round the tables of the Cristal de Maldón restaurant: smelling and tasting and chewing over fashion, prestige, the avant-garde, feeling between their teeth the crunch of power along with the toast on which they spread the purée made from the woodcock’s guts. A few years later, the restaurant was awarded two Michelin stars, although I didn’t need Francisco to tell me that—besides, he and Leonor almost never came back to Olba, well, she never returned and he did only very rarely, for his father’s funeral, for family matters, to divide up the inheritance with his siblings. No, the two Michelin stars were reported on the evening news, and I read about them later over a coffee in the bar. It was in the morning newspapers too. I leaf through them every day when I’m standing at the bar. I encountered Leonor again on the TV while I was peeling an orange after lunch in my dining room, they repeated it on Channel 1 news and showed a brief interview with her, the first woman in Spain to be awarded two Michelin stars, an extraordinary achievement in the macho world of haute cuisine, in a publication as thoroughly machista as Michelin. (How many female chefs have been awarded two stars in France? Or indeed in the rest of the world? I can’t remember if they said there was one in France or not.) I saw her often after that, as chefs occupied more and more TV space, and as Leonor embarked on a series of programs about taste: the cuisine of aromas, the cuisine of the senses, molecular gastronomy. I would watch her, in her chef’s hat and white coat, posing behind a tray of fish, holding a bunch of asparagus, a bouquet of greens, or a porcelain dish on which lay a grouper, Leonor smiling, her teeth glinting under the spotlights as if she were in a toothpaste ad (do they use that tooth-whitening stuff on your teeth before they film you, you bitch?), and I would have to turn off the television before she finished preparing whatever it was she was demonstrating and before she answered the questions put to her by the presenter, because the image on the screen immediately fused with the pictures
I still had stored away in my head and which suddenly leapt out, interposing themselves over and over, preventing me from seeing her actual image and instead dragging me back into a world of confused memories, both real and invented, and all unbearable. By then, Francisco, on his rare visits to Olba, no longer talked to me as a journalist or a writer; he talked to me about his powerful position on the magazine, his powerful position in certain wineries, his vital advice when it came to blending wines—what he called le coupage—choosing the casks, approving the labels and—most important of all—determining what he called “the philosophy of the wine,” which dictated its price. The more philosophy, the higher the price. And then there were his other businesses, Leonor’s restaurant, his various hotel projects, which involved hobnobbing with businessmen and politicians. The long nose of La Bécasse would appear on the screen, and what I would see was Leonor lying naked in Francisco’s arms. I can see her now. Leonor with her legs locked around him; Leonor’s face peering over that male shoulder, her eyes fixed on mine, her mouth half-open, and his ass pumping up and down, her feet drumming on them. Leonor on the front cover of a fashion magazine, holding a platter on which lies an intensely red, cardinal red lobster, which, when I look more closely, is actually a bloody doll curled up in a fetal position. I sit bolt upright in bed. I scream. I demand to be left in peace. Memories. The Francisco you see now, so good-natured and simple, playing a game of cards in the evening with his fellow villagers, out walking in the country, strolling along the beach at Misent, hiking up Montdor, using a stick to help himself along, because Montdor is all rocks and thorny shrubs, the perfect backdrop for one of those re-enactments of the Passion that many villages put on at Easter, it’s the most inhospitable place you can imagine, a vertiginous forty-five or fifty-degree slope, sharp, skittering pebbles among which grow thorn bushes of every variety nature can dream up: thistles, gorse, scrub oak, and God knows what else: I can see him on some mornings from the balcony of my house, heading for the mountain, panting hard, I imagine, climbing that steep slope, a born-again countryside lover and guardian of its traditions and symbols: the harsh sacred mountain, the earth fertilized by the bones of his ancestors, or, rather, the bones of the fugitives hunted down by his ancestors, by his own father, some of whom must still be there, their bones crumbling into the soil, a surf-and-turf landscape, irrigated and unirrigated land, against a backdrop of sea and marsh; our ancestors used to make that rich, succulent risotto with turnips, pig’s trotters and black pudding, more or less as we make it today, I suppose, and he records this in the book he’s writing, manifestations of the spirit of the race, the Volkgeist, the homeland to which the pilgrim has returned to take refuge: with what joy, my home, I now behold thee (that was the version we sang in the school choir, the song of the pilgrims at the end of Tannhäuser as they gaze down upon Rome: we also sang the Falangist anthem, Cara al sol and another Falangist hymn: Montañas nevadas; it was obligatory, and it drove my father mad, but there was no other school I could go to), the land appropriated by man, the culture that has grown up there: the rocky slopes and the risotto, the anisettes and herb liqueurs, and the groves of oranges and grapefruits and gardens full of climbing beans twining about canes, and the fields of broad beans bent low by the rain that the east wind draws up from the sea, and the green leaves of pepper and tomato plants; and the marsh, which was once the basis of our cuisine and is now an abandoned swamp that no one visits. He records all these things. There you have it: the endless lunches with local bigwigs, slippery Justino and the now vanished Pedrós; Carlos, the manager of the local bank, who says he chose to be transferred here rather than to Misent, so he can stay in touch with nature, but above all, although he doesn’t say this, because in Misent a house like the one he owns at the foot of Montdor would cost him a fortune; Mateu, the dealer in fruit and vegetables, who exports to half of Europe; Bernal, who contaminated the lagoon with his roofing felt (how many centuries does it take for poisonous asbestos to disappear?); the cardgames in the evening in the Bar Castañer, where the cream of Olba gathers, by which I mean the property owners, the car dealers, the owners of supermarkets and whole hectares of fruit trees; bank clerks, council workers; active participants in deals both clean and murky, a fauna as prickly as the shrubs on Montdor: all gathered around the marble tables that echo to the sound of dominoes being slammed down; the one who wanted to imitate the Kennedys and who has disappeared, carrying off with him all my savings; the trafficker of human flesh; the one leaving half the population of Olba homeless (ah, those mortgages so blithely taken out in a happier decade); the teacher who conducts the local band, and, sometimes, even the pleasant, absent-minded philosophy teacher from the secondary school in Misent, who lives in Olba because—and here the Epicurean philosopher and the ruthless bank manager agree—it’s a more peaceful, authentic place: once again, the homeland, with what joy, my home, I now behold thee, covering up the economic fact that a house in Olba costs exactly half what a house in Misent would cost; like Francisco, some are peacefully retired, others—like the man from the bank—are in the first phase of their socio-economic rise. A card game that enjoys great local prestige has been joined by the local carpenter, who, since Francisco’s return, has changed tables and now plays with the crème de la crème, legitimized by his vaguely well-traveled, vaguely adventurous, vaguely hippie past and by his vaguely cultivated present (you can have a conversation with the carpenter, he knows what he’s talking about), and by his mysterious, solitary, sedentary life, shut away from the world, which has gone on for decades now; legitimized by the fact that I often used to join Pedrós at the bar and, above all, because Francisco slaps me on the back and refers to me openly as his childhood friend, his traveling companion, his colleague who has rejected the vanities of this world to embrace the profession of those who prefer a simple life on the margins, saints like St. Joseph, a good artisan. More like the perfect profession for a cuckold, I think. Francisco casually stirs his post-prandial coffee, as if that ritual and that way of life were the only acceptable ones, the same nonchalance with which, at one time, he aligned himself—as if inadvertently—with what my old friend Morán, whom I met in Ibiza and whose articles I also used to read in the national press (I don’t know what’s become of him either), defined as “an elite poised to plunder.” Now, beatus ille, he has, in the serenity of his mature years, embraced scorn for the court and praise of the village. Here the days and months pass, and there’s not so much as a hint of Francisco’s former alliance with that ruthless, voracious elite, no sense of what was once the very hub of his existence. It’s as if nothing had happened between us or within us since those shared years of childhood and adolescence; I even find myself believing it, I can even understand why he bought that house, after all, who doesn’t want the perfect place in which to spend his declining years, a luxurious monastery, until, that is, you go to Misent with him one day, and, as if by chance and after much random wandering about, we find that our walk—apparently unplanned—has led us to the marina. And he distractedly raises one arm and points, saying, look, Esteban, just perfect for a little trip around the bay one morning, his finger still pointing, inviting me to look, and what he’s inviting me to look at, what, according to him, is just perfect for a little trip around the bay one morning, is a sailboat moored in the port, an elegant sailboat that turns out to be his, the little boat he’d mentioned once, as if in passing, while you were discussing something else, and whose existence you’d completely forgotten about, because you didn’t believe there was much truth in it: a little boat, you assumed, the kind that any guy could afford during the boom years, what people call a motorboat and which is little more than a dinghy. But no, you suddenly realize that the reason he’s taken you on this excursion is so you won’t die without seeing it, yes, he has to make sure that the carpenter sees it, he has to deliver the coup de grâce before the carpenter bites the dust of a natural death, pretty much as a matador does with a bull, finishing the animal off quickly before
the spectators start booing because the bull is taking too long to die, and as we all know, no one is so young that he might not die tomorrow, so it’s just as well that the carpenter should see the sailboat and feel envy and pain and sadness, I may have lost Leonor—except that you lost her first, I think to myself. I wonder, did he ever find out about us? Did Leonor ever tell him? I don’t believe so, a relationship with no added value is just a piece of junk you get rid of—but I have a beautiful house and a sailboat (it’s like that nursery rhyme: I have, I have, but you have nothing, I have three sheep, one to milk and another to keep), and so he invites you to jump on board, you walk across the teak deck, he takes you down to the saloon with its kitchen and its dining table, which is laid as if for some imminent banquet, and the little bar with its shelves of bottles, and he opens the door of the bathroom, and then shows you the two bedrooms, holy shit, this is just amazing, says the artisan, the cuckolded St. Joseph, so skilled at planing a piece of wood, who climbs up a few steps to see the screens of blinking lights on the instrument panel. It’s very comfortable, says Francisco, adding for further emphasis, yes, it really is very comfortable. As if I were trembling with admiration and emotion and pride just to know that what I see and touch and caress belongs to my old friend, my traveling companion, and as if he wanted to bring me back down to a modest reality. There’s the plain language he uses as proof: yes, she’s a cozy old thing. You can sail her or use the motor, she’s got a 200-horsepower engine. But this cozy old thing isn’t moored in the harbor built by the town council for the small boats of those who define themselves as the new middle class and who are, in fact, a conglomerate of variants of the conscienceless working-class created by Thatcherism and which the current crisis is sweeping away, taking them down a notch or two, and, as a consequence, many of the small boats moored in that popular, municipal harbor now have cardboard signs saying for sale bargain price. No, Francisco doesn’t have his yacht moored there, but in the Marina Esmeralda, where the yachts of German or Gibraltarian or Russian millionaires rub shoulders, ninety-foot-long boats that belong to traffickers of something or other—sausages, mass-produced bread and cakes, works of art, money or weapons—yachts owned by builders who’ve put more tons of cocaine into the market than they have cement; launderers of dollars, euros, pounds. Is there anyone in that marina who has earned an honest living, apart from the waiters, who, tray in hand, ply the quayside bars, alongside the shops offering yachts for sale at more than half a million euros? And even those waiters can be rather alarming if they happen to meet your eye while pouring out the whisky-on-the-rocks you ordered. They’re not waiters, they’re thugs, bodyguards, dealers in stolen goods and illegal substances, pimps, hitmen, mules, drug smugglers, the rent boys of yacht owners, the servants of smarmy mafiosi who, when interviewed on the local TV news, describe themselves as owners of nocturnal marketing businesses. Yes, Francisco, that’s what le grand monde is. I know the good life is essentially contrary to the law and to justice, and is rigorously incompatible with charity, but life is short, and no one is so young that he cannot die tomorrow and no one so old as to think he cannot live another year. Do you remember that quote? You studied philosophy at university and you read it out to me once, to this idiot whose father was forcing him to be an artist and who didn’t know what he wanted to be, but knew absolutely what he didn’t want to be. In showing me his yacht—as when he showed me his house—Francisco is confirming that for him the rustic life—playing cards at the Bar Castañer included—is merely a game in a toy shop, and that these are the rules imposed by the game he has chosen to play, like in the game of the goose, where, if you land on a square with a goose on it, that allows you to jump over your competitors; or when you play Battleship, you call out the number and letter of the target square and the other player says hit or miss, and you can then either cross it out or not: every game has its rules, rules that are only valid for as long as the game lasts, and that’s certainly so in his case, the rules governing his game as humble villager last only as long as the evening round of cards, and those rules no longer obtain (one day, we really must share a fantastic peaty whisky I’ve put aside especially for us, he says, closing a small wooden door) when he allows you a second viewing of his house, the now restored Civera house; and the carpenter who never even made it to cabinetmaker grade sees the furniture: kingwood, rosewood, mahogany, the glass cabinets in which Francisco keeps ancient volumes bound in silk or shagreen, then there are the paintings by Gordillo, engravings by Tàpies, watercolors by Barceló and Broto. But all this must be worth a fortune, I say, and he laughs, yes, I haven’t done too badly, I’ll tell you about it some time, and so with him I always have the impression that when he talks about the people he hates (he specializes in public rants against unscrupulous businessmen and unethical bankers, fulminating against the mad speculative property bubble of the last few years, although not, of course, when he’s with Pedrós, Justino or Bernal), he is, in fact, inveighing against himself, shitting on his own biography—the cosmopolitan Mr. Hyde versus the card-playing country bumpkin Dr. Jekyll. But all this paints a very hasty, even clumsy portrait. We need to delve back into his past as a young Catholic with a social vocation, a member of JEC, JOC and HOAC and so on. He even considered becoming a seminarian; he yearned for justice, aspired to a universal, egalitarian happiness, well, who didn’t at the time, with all that talk of liberation theology: becoming a worker-priest in Franco’s Spain or a guerrilla priest—as Camilo Torres went on to be—somewhere in Latin America, but his cock was made of a material all too susceptible to the magnet of sex, a psychophysiological remora that many priests manage to transform into a precious pastoral tool thanks to the invaluable collaboration of that authentic network of erotic contacts—the confessional; although what closed that particular path to him was, I believe, his realization that power within the Church was being offered to him as a very demanding fruit, born of a combination of overly complex codes and rhetorics, strict regulations, and, at the same time, certain very subtle movements, insinuations, hints, a slightly raised eyebrow, an imperceptible pursing of the lips. He preferred to take more direct action than was usual among the clergy, whose complicated labyrinth, designed on baroque lines, was the legacy of the Council of Trent, which required that any advances should be made very slowly indeed; going through the motions of submitting to the hierarchy, engaging in secret intrigues, irrational surrenders or acts of obedience, too much whispering and not enough shouting, and shouting was precisely what politics offered him when he took it by the horns in the late 1970s: politics, it must be said, was a far franker world, its tactics and strategies more overt (the very opposite of his father’s modus operandi), and one’s own image had a public dimension, true, Francisco’s first steps were taken in the age of clandestinity—even though the transition had already begun—but all the people involved knew each other, and there were no secret negotiations in the corridors of parishes, sacristies and archbishops’ palaces: you ran the cells, you held semi-clandestine meetings and you gained a certain prestige, still under your nom de guerre, while the dictatorless dictatorship continued to crumble, but once democracy was in place, that was it—stripped of your nom de guerre, you appeared under your real name, and with this one slogan, politics as the supreme and almost unique value, far superior to any other form of social activism: you would climb onto the platform and shout, your shouts amplified thanks to a superb sound system (paid for by your Swedish, German and French comrades, social democrats showing their solidarity with the anti-Franco struggle) and accompanied by drums and flutes played at full blast, 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 inhab
iting 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:
On the Edge Page 17