On the Edge (19 page)

rien de vraiment précis
: you end up in a tunnel with no light at its end, a suffocatingly hot tunnel that wears you down. It’s very unlikely that a dynamic like that will produce a miracle. He was fabricating, or should I say constructing, his CV—I don’t know which is the better way of putting it—beginning with a rapid exit from a badly-paid job as a schoolteacher, a job he had accepted not because he needed the money, but as one of the rites of passage demanded by his own particular
bildungsroman
: first it was the Catholic youth movements he belonged to, then the visits to working-class areas, his political engagement, which he again abandoned to devote himself entirely to politics proper, which he also soon tired of, as soon, in fact, as he had woven the web that would allow him to entrap his prey.

“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,