“When I get to heaven I am going to ask St. Peter to take me to the man who invented the dry martini,” wrote William Buckley. “Just so I can say thanks.”
Who was that man? Not an easy question to answer.
There are three hypotheses. The “San Francisco theory” attributes it to the bartender Jerry Thomas, born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1825, who worked in the bar of the Hotel Occidental in San Francisco. In 1862 he published his Bartenders’ Guide, in which he includes inventions such as the Tom & Jerry and the Blue Blazer. Et voilà! In a later edition, in 1887 there appears a new cocktail called the Martinez. Martinez was a town in California and, according to the legend, Thomas made it for a man who was on his way to Martinez. “Very well, friend, this is a new drink I’ve just invented for your journey,” he said. Martinez became Martine, and then Martini.
But the citizens of Martinez have their own theory (the “Martinez theory”). It’s this: in about 1870 there was a bar owned by a Frenchman named Jules Richelieu, who had moved there from New Orleans. On one occasion a miner came in and asked for a whiskey. Richelieu filled his hip flask, but the man, on trying it, spat it out and cursed. Ashamed, the Frenchman is supposed to have said: “Wait, I’d like you to try something different.” He made a mixture and served it in a glass with an olive. The miner tried it, smiled, drank it all down in one go, and asked Richelieu: “What is it?” Richelieu replied: “It’s a Martinez cocktail.”
The final hypothesis (the “New York theory”) is that of a mysterious bartender named Martini di Arma di Taggia, an Italian immigrant, who worked in the bar of the now-defunct Knickerbocker Hotel in New York (on 42nd and Broadway). According to this version it was invented in 1912, and became popular because it was the favorite drink of John D. Rockefeller, a hypothesis supported by one of the best known experts on cocktails, the Englishman John Doxat, author of The World of Drinks and Drinking (1971).
For sad Jack London, the martini was a symbol of social ascent: going from whiskey to martini was like jumping from the frozen wastes of the Yukon to the drawing rooms of the Upper West Side.
Oh, no! What do we do now?
We close the bars!
On January 16, 1920, thirty-six states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale of alcohol.
Buñuel, who was in Los Angeles around that period, wrote in his memoirs: “I have never drunk as much as I did during the period of Prohibition.”
It lasted until 1934, when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the decree repealing it in the Oval Office of the White House, in front of the press. To drive home the point, he mixed the first legal martini for the cameras and the flashbulbs.
The dry martini entered literature and the cinema. Hollywood grabbed hold of it and the actors drank it like crazy. David Niven always had a glass in his hand. Marlene Dietrich only chose lovers who drank martinis (as she admitted once to Hemingway), and its short glass, like an upside-down umbrella, was reproduced in paintings, photographs, and advertisements. The one by Mel Ramos is famous: a naked woman sitting in a glass of martini.
The best verse was written by Dorothy Parker (hers is the brilliant phrase: “brevity is the soul of lingerie”). Her poem says:
I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under the host.
14
I graduated high school at the end of that year and enrolled to study philosophy at the National University. Mother took her head in her hands and started crying. Father said angrily, oh, my God, first the girl becomes a guerrilla and now this fool wants to become an intellectual, it’s like a disease! what did we do to have children like this, Lord? why are you trying our patience?
Whenever we were out on the street and Father saw beggars under a bridge, he would say, look, Manuel, a philosophers’ convention, is that what you want from life? you’re going to die of hunger! To stop him bugging me, I showed him an Internet page that said the philosopher Fernando Savater had been paid twenty-five thousand euros for a lecture. Father looked at it suspiciously and said, it isn’t possible, it must be a mistake or a fake, Manuel, you faked it, you can fake anything with the Internet … Who is this Savater?
The university! At last I was leaving that absurd high school behind. Getting out and spending my time with people similar to me was a blessed respite. Although not without its drawbacks. One mistake we make when we’re young is to believe that people who are interested in the same things as we are must necessarily be similar to us. Nature does its work, the spirit blows where it will. There are envious and wicked people even in worlds that we would think are dominated by clarity and beauty, but be that as it may, at the university I began a period of calm, intense reading, and for the first time felt that I was finding some kind of harmony.
The first semester passed, then the second.
Apart from my own classes, I loved to wander around the fine arts department, sometimes sneaking into one of the studios to see what they were doing. There too, surrounded by the smell of turpentine, in those spaces dominated by the sensual qualities of color and volume, I felt a great sense of peace, although I never regretted my choice. I was getting to know the world. Sometimes, when I left my classes late or stuck around for a talk in the lecture theater, I’d paint secretly on the walls of the faculty: letters, islands, storms, skies.
It was a period of long silences, Consul. My life had settled into a pleasant routine, and repeating it daily, without any upsets, was a genuine relief. Attending my classes, reading in the library, going to seminars and lectures, reading on the bus, reading on the lawns of the university, reading at home, going to the movies, scribbling in exercise books, taking notes. Life at home was the same as ever, but now I could also be a long way away. As I got used to the outside world, Mother and Father came to seem as if they belonged to another era, like an old sepia photograph.
Another semester passed, and another.
Sometimes Juana would come and find me after my classes and we’d have a glass of red wine in the cafeteria or go up to Chapinero for a bite to eat. I can still see her on the sidewalk, her hands deep in her pockets, shivering with cold in the wind coming down from the hills or avoiding the fumes from the buses. We’d eat whatever, Chinese food, fried chicken, pizza, and talk about my courses, the things we were both reading, movies, and sometimes also about politics, but while I talked or listened to her talking I felt something strange, a kind of premature nostalgia, as if in those chats of ours I already had a premonition of what was soon going to happen: her disappearance, the way that suddenly, without anything unusual happening, she stopped being among us, without a word, which was worse than if she’d died, Consul, because when someone dies you’re there, you witness their deterioration and are aware of the advance of death, its progress, and there even comes a time when you want it to come and set everyone free.
Juana disappeared without anything to suggest it was about to happen, although later, remembering those afternoons at the university, it seemed to me that a wind of anguish was already blowing our way, the urgency of something that was about to fall, because sad and tragic things do announce their coming, I believe, they don’t come just like that, they aren’t mere chance, don’t you agree? At least that’s how I remember it now, how I imagine it, even though I always end up wondering, what could she have feared in those years? I knew very little of Juana’s life. Her constant absences, coming back early in the morning, bursting into tears for no obvious reason, all that was a mystery. That’s how we remember people who disappear or die, everything that happened before seems bathed in a symbolic glow, an aura that, with hindsight, appears to be the forewarning of a tragedy.
I’ve observed that there are two ways to die.
The first is an illness that causes us to deteriorate and submerges us in a slow agony. That’s sad, but in a way it’s good for the relatives and friends, who have time to get used
to the idea, although it’s painful to the dying person himself, because of all the pain, decay, and indignity it carries with it. The second is the opposite: a gunshot in the back of the neck, a brain hemorrhage, a traffic accident. Your relatives suffer but you go quietly. You go quickly to the other side. That’s the best way.
But there’s a third way, at least in our country, a way that’s cruel for everybody: disappearance. For everybody? The victim suffers from imagining the anguish of his nearest and dearest. The relatives suffer because they cling to any hope they can, and when it’s lost they suffer even more when they imagine the terrible loneliness of the death: someone kneeling in a patch of waste ground, in the early morning, shaking with fear, pissing in his pants, then two or three flashes and, already, a lifeless body falling into a hole, the earth covering it, vegetation growing over it and hiding it, the long suffering of those who spend years investigating, searching for that place, that horrible, monstrous place, trying to understand the reasons, the still inexplicable reasons, for what happened, why he was killed, to find his bones and clasp them and kiss them, trying to relieve the loneliness, to bathe it with tears.
When Juana disappeared I felt all that: grief, hatred, sadness, pity, resentment, guilt.
There wasn’t even a date, at what moment did she go? We didn’t know, we didn’t even realize. She would go on her travels, giving vague details, and the family got used to it. I got used to it. Juana would ask me to understand, tell me that she was still working on our escape plan, that I shouldn’t ask questions, that I should trust her blindly. That’s why I didn’t know at what moment it happened.
One day I simply noticed she wasn’t there anymore.
And so began that succession of ideas, of intolerable images, of hurtful words. My first reaction was to grab my bag of spray cans and paint her on all the walls of the city: her eyes, the palm of her hand supporting her chin, her smiling face, her figure walking towards me, and a question, where are you? For me it was inconceivable that the world should continue to turn without her, that the sun should rise and shoots should emerge from the trunks of trees and there should be disasters in distant places, how could the wheel not stop? One day, on Thirtieth, I walked past one of my paintings and saw that someone, an anonymous graffiti artist, had written beside it: “Why don’t you come back? can’t you see how he’s suffering?” Somehow, the city was answering me.
She’s been murdered, I thought, she must be in one of those mass graves in this country that’s rich in cemeteries, our beautiful national territory, the body must be rotting, her bones must be starting to separate without anybody caressing them, without my having had the chance to kiss them.
Where are you, Juana?
I thought it would be enough to love her and walk about the city, reproducing her and calling to her on streets and avenues; I thought that intuition or a ray of sunlight, as in the poem by Salvatore Quasimodo, would indicate a place, but that didn’t happen. We reported her missing, and the small amount of information we were able to obtain showed that she hadn’t been arrested or murdered or kidnapped, of course the disappeared have no record of their disappearance, that’s why they call them disappeared, but you have to start somewhere, and Father, with that blind faith of his in the country that, according to him, “we had at last,” went to police stations, prisons, courthouses, hospitals, the ombudsman, and, finally, to his hated NGOs.
That’s when he started to change: his admiration for Uribe weakened and one day I heard him say that human rights weren’t being respected in Colombia, that our family had already lost the war, and that there had been enough raised fists and hot air. With bloodshot eyes and an expression that might well have been weariness, he said, we have to do things differently, we can’t carry on like this.
One Sunday, much to my surprise, he came and woke me early. Get dressed quickly and come with me, Manuel, your mother doesn’t want to come. I got up without knowing what it was about and had the shock of my life: Father was going to a demonstration for the disappeared! He was wearing a T-shirt that said Where are they? and holding a banner with a colored photograph of Juana. I had taken that photograph, Consul, and it was one of the best ones we had of her. On it she was smiling, just about to puff at a cigarette, looking out of the corner of her eye, as if keeping a humorous eye on someone, and raising a glass of wine. Father had chosen that photograph, and below it, in black letters, he had written Juana Manrique, twenty-four, disappeared November 2008.
I got up and took a quick shower, put on a white T-shirt, on which I wrote my sister’s name, and went out with him, by his side for once, feeling that for the first time something united us. How strange this is, I thought, after a life spent not understanding each other, with me thinking him mediocre, always judging him harshly, but that morning, seeing him advancing along Seventh to Plaza de Bolívar, raising the banner with his daughter’s name and shouting, where is she? I admired him, for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of him and I felt proud to be by his side, absorbing his cries so that his voice and mine should be one, and so I also raised my fist and cried out, feeling less alone, cried out for what we had lost that now made us both the same person.
Juana Manrique! where is she?
A mass of people was advancing, yelling slogans, holding up flags and banners with bloodstained silhouettes of the country, patterns of bones, mounds of corpses, crows with military hats, an enormous skeleton with a scythe in its hand and the presidential sash across its chest, saying, “Colombia, I will liberate you.” And the cry went up:
“Uribe, watch out, the people are coming!”
The demonstration reached Plaza de Bolívar, where the organizers had set up an enormous dais for the main event just in front of the steps of Congress. For a couple of hours there were orators citing testimonies and giving analyses, declarations of support from some senators and political personalities, songs, and even a mime show, the mimes weeping in silence, swallowing their sighs and their tears just as we were all doing in that square, a couple thousand sad, angry people, some still hopeful, until slowly it started to spit, the sky darkened, and the rain came down, in a neutral, subdued way at first, but then, after some terrifying claps of thunder, the downpour really began, forcing some of the people to run and take shelter in the colonnades of the cathedral or under the eaves on Eighth Street. Others took out umbrellas and remained in front of the stage, where the mimes were looking up at the clouds and making gestures of surprise. That’s how the rain is in Bogotá, it always arrives at the worst or saddest moments.
We started walking back along Seventh looking for some transportation heading north, but the street was closed because of the demonstration so we had to go on foot, dodging puddles, from eave to eave, avoiding the rain. Father didn’t care about getting wet, but jealously protected the banner with the photograph of Juana, maybe he was trying to protect her; and so we walked side by side in silence in that ghostly city that is Bogotá in the rain.
Without knowing how, absorbed in our thoughts, we reached Chapinero, just as the black clouds dispersed and you could finally see a piece of the sky.
As we crossed Fiftieth and Seventh a black Mercedes passed us. One of its wheels hit a puddle and the water it threw up splashed our pants, making them even wetter than they already were. The driver turned and looked at me, just for a second, but long enough for me to recognize him. It was Edgar Porras.
The Mercedes moved away and I saw him looking at me in the rearview mirror, I hesitated for a moment, but then I grabbed Father’s arm and said, let’s carry on, old man, let’s walk a little more, it’s only just twelve-thirty, we should be in time for lunch.
Mother didn’t change. Whenever she mentioned Juana’s disappearance her voice was sad, but the tragedy didn’t seem to have shifted anything essential inside her. She carried on the same, and had her problems with Father. Luckily, I was almost never there at mealtimes.
Sometimes, Father would come into my room in the early hours
. He would apologize and say, I saw the light was on, Manuel, can I come in for a while? I can’t get to sleep, dammit … He’d sit down on my bed, take a quart of aguardiente from the pocket of his dressing gown, and have a few slugs. He’d offer it to me and I’d say, I can’t sleep either, that’s why I’m reading. But he’d say, if only I could, Manuel, if only I could stop thinking. He’d sit there for a while in silence. Then we’d hug and he’d go. Seeing his resigned expression, I knew he would spend the night awake. His prayers, like mine, drifted up into the darkest part of the sky and faded away. There was nobody who could listen to them.
I told you that we never found out exactly when she disappeared, because she had gotten us used to her being away for long periods, and this was just the latest one; only when too much time had passed without her coming back did I decide to call her on her cell phone, and not getting any reply or any e-mail message, I realized that something was wrong. So I said to Father, do you know when Juana is coming back? And he looked worried and said, I was just about to ask you the same question, son, I don’t have any idea, how come you don’t know? That’s how it all started. That’s when we reported her missing and began the round of police stations, prisons, and hospitals.
Sometime later Mother said something that stayed in everybody’s heads, but which nobody dared to repeat. She said it to Father when he had come back from one of his fruitless visits to some hospital or courthouse.
Oh, Alberto, maybe she ended up with FARC.
She said it, and Father immediately put his hand over her mouth, a gesture that was meant to be strong but in fact was merely desperate.
Never say that again, Bertha. Ever.
Night Prayers Page 11