Sweet Croquette
by David Barba
El Carmel
When I found out about the disappearance of Swiss gourmet Pascal Henry, I had no doubt that his body had become part of the larder for the liquid croquettes offered on the degustation menu at El Bulli. It happened June 12, 2008, when he went out to get his wallet and never came back for dessert; he left his hat, a notebook filled with gastronomic observations, and the bill, which was yet to be paid. He was never seen alive again.
I decided to investigate the crime the minute I read the article about it in La Vanguardia while I was having my breakfast of café au lait and a Chester cigarette at the Delicias bar, across the street from the Montaña Pelada. Later I took a walk on the hill in order to get the facts of the case straight, especially because I couldn’t get that damned gourmet out of my head. Up there, I could sit and contemplate the city’s putrid sky and delight in the Sagrada Familia’s spires, the San Pablo Hospital watchtowers, the Cathedral’s needles, and the rail tracks along the port, not to mention the swarm of phalluslike glass-and-steel towers which have, in the last few years, smudged the kind face of Barcelona that I’ve known since childhood.
Pascal Henry also had a kind face. I remember a picture of him next to chef Paul Bocuse, in which they’re both smiling and a little flushed from wine, their cheeks so puffy that a couple of quick slices would have produced a pair of succulent pork chops. After all, meat is meat, and anthropology long ago proved that if we’ve put aside cannibalism, it’s only because it’s been turned into a cultural taboo. In my opinion, we humans will end up eating each other sooner or later, and we’ll season the filets with fine herbs. We’re all gourmets.
What I have in common with Ferran Adrià is that we were both born in a squalid neighborhood on the edge of Barcelona. As a kid, I also played with my chemistry set and my sister’s toy kitchens. So, with a little bit of luck, I too could have become a star chef. Unfortunately, fate also bequeathed me a fine palette and a certain taste for exotic meats. And I say “unfortunately” because, instead of being born in the bosom of a bourgeois family from Guy Savoy’s Paris, or Pierre Gagnaire’s or L’Arpège’s, I was born a boy in the Reyes Robledo family, an illustrious clan of short, pigheaded day laborers from the Cazorla Mountains, immigrants to Barcelona along with hordes of other cheap workers who came to fatten the industrious factories of Catalonia in the ’60s. Here, in the Carmelo neighborhood, my parents opened a butcher shop on Santuarios Street, in the same place immortalized by Juan Marsé in Últimas tardes con Teresa, that famous ode to the neighborhood that was always my home, or, in other words, the vulgar place from which my restlessness rose. I’m not from here or there; just an anonymous charnego, that pejorative that so well captures the traditional disdain that tried-and-true Catalonians had for the descendants of Andalusians, at least until the arrival of all these blacks, Moors, Chinese, and South Americans who now make up the lowest rungs of our feverish and multicultural social ladder.
Yes, I’m a racist. But no one should confuse me with the usual sociological profile of the uneducated child of immigrants who embraces xenophobia. I studied Spanish philology at the Universidad Central. With a little bit of luck, I might have been able to avoid my fate among pork chops, but nobody opened that door for me. If I’d been more of a trouser snake with one of those girls from college, I might have carved out a future as a landlord. But I couldn’t get rid of that outsider air about me and I preferred the comfort of marriage to Maruja, my lifelong sweetheart. When she was twenty-eight years old, she still had the big, perky tits I fell in love with; her ass was like a cow’s, and it only got better and better over time, as the composition of her muscles swelled. And better yet, my fresh-faced girl made a Córdoba-style salmorejo sauce to die for. Too bad that someday she’d want more out of life.
Things went awry when they inaugurated the Juan Marsé Library a few steps from our house. Maruja signed up for a book club in which, inevitably, she discovered all of his novels. I suspect that quarrelsome charnego universe chock full of heroes made her reconsider our mediocrity. All of a sudden, she developed an enormous curiosity about the other face of Barcelona. She sought it out in novels like Eduardo Mendoza’s La ciudad de los prodigios, Juan Miñana’s La playa de Pekín, and Francisco Casavella’s El día del Watusi, which had the same effect on her as Don Quixote on chivalry: it alienated her from our modest food business. I wasn’t worried until the Sunday she didn’t tend to the chicken roaster so that she could lay on the couch and read. Although it’s true that it was our third week without a day off, I did think it was a bit much to simply declare, while painting her toenails a fiery red and never once lifting her gaze from a book of poems by David Castillo, that I shouldn’t count on her help with the business anymore. What kind of intellectual crap had she begun to believe? Did she think books were going to put food on the table? I’d had similar thoughts when I graduated, when it still hadn’t sunk in that everything was already foretold, and that in Catalonia, without the right surname or relative, you can’t get very far. There’s nothing worse than a cultured peasant, than being aware of the glass ceiling above your head that will impede all your professional advancement. At first, I went to all the publishing houses, bookstores, and cultural centers in the city. I must have handed out two hundred resumes, but it was futile. I gave up a year and a half later, thanks to my father, who never quite got over looking at me as if I were a lazy ass and reminding me of the security that came with inheriting the business. The day I decided to put on an apron, I also decided I’d never read another book.
Life went on, I kept cutting filets, until that notorious fall, when my stupid wife began wearing a Palestinian scarf, avidly watching Lorenzo Milá’s newscasts, and supporting the gay marriage law, obviously under the influence of her new friends from the book club. It was just a short step from there to reading Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s work.
“What are you thinking?” I asked her one afternoon when I went upstairs wearing my bloody apron and found her working her back into some absurd yoga pose while reading the adventures of Detective Pepe Carvalho.
“I just want to get some culture,” she answered. “It seems like all I do is go up and down the stairs from the house to the butcher shop.”
Maruja had always read, but not much more than what was given as gifts to her parents, a pair of immigrants from Córdoba, and maybe a best seller by Dominique Lapierre or Jorge Bucay, and, inevitably, The Da Vinci Code, after which she began to show some bizarre tendencies like refusing to greet Don Victorino, the priest who married us at the parish of Mare de Déu del Coll.
“Maruja, I meant your back,” I said, feigning concern. “You have scoliosis.”
She shifted her body and brought her eyes up from Los mares del Sur like a cheap femme fatale. “Manolo, I’m going to study humanities,” she spit at me.
Our marriage began to drift after the last New Year’s Eve we spent with the family. My parents barely spoke — they never had anything to say aside from things like “Slice up two hundred grams of jerky” and “Debone some pig’s feet.” But Maruja, who’d always been our family’s joy, didn’t say a word either, and after we were done with our coffee, she had the nerve to go throw herself on the couch to read another one of her novels, while the rest of us had to deal with Spanish TV’s New Year’s Eve special with the comedy duo of Cruz and Raya. Every now and then, Maruja would smirk while we laughed heartily. But the worst came when it was time to unwrap the gifts and I found myself with a recipe book by Ferran Adrià in my hands.