“Let’s see if you smarten up and get the business up to date,” she said in a derisive tone.
“Now you’re going to knock my cooking?”
“It’s just that your ham croquettes are so common.”
“What’s wrong with my croquettes?”
“They’re dry. I dare you to try making El Bulli’s liquid croquettes.”
This was too much. With a gesture that signaled I was offended, I went to my room, which upset my mother. At first, I just left Adrià’s recipe book on the night table. But after a while, curiosity got to me and I broke my vow against reading to see what in heaven’s name a liquid croquette could be. That recipe book was my undoing! Reading it robbed me of reason. I didn’t understand a thing. All of a sudden, my world of oxtails, sausages, and veal steaks came crashing down faced under Adrià’s techno-passionate cuisine, spherification with alginics, oysters with carrot, fake melon caviar, hot water gelatin dusted with agar... After going head to head with the ovens belonging to the messiah of modern liquidity, how could I continue the daily heresy of cooking dry croquettes? The first symptoms of depression arrived that spring.
The same day I was coming back from the doctor with a prescription for headache medicine and an unemployment certificate in my pocket, I ran into Maruja sitting on the windowsill, with her back up against a wall, her feet bare, and her thighs obscenely escaping from under her dress. She was so absorbed in her reading, she didn’t even ask why I wasn’t at work at the shop.
“What are you reading?” I only said this to break the ice.
“It’s called La lectora,” she responded enthusiastically. “It’s by a friend from the book club. A genius! He even won a prize at the Semana Negra in Gijón. It’s about a student in Bogotá who’s kidnapped by a bunch of lower-class delinquents so she’ll read them a book. It’s because... they don’t know how to read.”
I was stunned. What was this bitch telling me? Couldn’t she see she’d ruined my life? Hadn’t she noticed me utterly defeated before the ovens, trying desperately, in vain, to copy the damned postmodern liquid croquette recipe? Why did she have to engage with me now, after months of ignoring me, just to tell me about some asinine criminal plot birthed in some third world hut in the twisted and odious mind of some Latin American?
Techno-passionate cuisine was my refuge as my marriage degenerated. I was soon making secret reservations at restaurants run by copycats of the star chef — and I discovered there were dozens of them, hundreds, most of whom destroyed the liquid croquettes as badly or even worse than I did. They all had something in common with me: they dreamed of setting foot one day in El Bulli, the exclusive restaurant on Cala Monjoi, which only serves eight thousand diners per season. My attempts to make a reservation were in vain. We’re sorry, please call again next year, they’d tell me over and over. A wall of gourmets and half the world’s plutocrats, all with wallets thicker than mine, moved in front of me. My frustration was growing at a dizzying rate and the headache medicine barely had an effect. It didn’t take long for me to start drinking, and on more than one night I ended up sleeping it off at the bar counter, crying on the shoulder of some obese dropout from the culinary school.
One afternoon, everything came to a head. I had been strolling down Cala Monjoi, as I often did in those jobless days, so I could revel in the envy provoked by diners leaving El Bulli in their big cars, with a blonde as arm candy and a belly full of deconstructed tortilla española. I’d spent the afternoon planning to buy a rifle with a telescopic sight so I could fire above the diners’ heads; later I thought an AK-47 might be a better way to get a table without a reservation, like a Vietnam vet, and I got so excited at the thought that I almost killed myself on the highway, pushing my old SEAT Panda to the limit of how fast it could go. As I sped up the Carmelo highway and turned toward my house, a certain scent of burnt lamb made me think it might be better if I stopped at the mechanic’s on Santuarios to check the car while I calmed my nerves with a couple of drinks at the nearby bar, El Pibe.
I was attended to by a young indigenous man with lips as thick as Mallorcan sausages. He had an air about him like a juvenile delinquent and, given the tiresome salsa music that was spilling from the speakers, I figured he was Colombian.
“What’s up, bro? The spark plugs are practically dead!” he declared after a simple peek at the engine. “I’ll have it ready for you in a half hour.”
I was on my way out the door when I happened to glance at the speaker delivering that relentless musical torture and saw a framed university degree, a master’s in philosophy and letters from the University of Cartagena de Indias. Another aspiring South American intellectual working like a peon in Barcelona, I thought as my gaze moved around the mess in the office and bumped into a familiar-looking book under some papers. It was a copy of La lectora. That’s when I realized the smell of burnt lamb wasn’t coming from the engine but from my own head.
“Do you like to read, buddy?” the mechanic asked when he saw my eyes fixed on the book’s cover. “I’ll give you a copy of my novel. I just work here to put food on the table for my eight kids, but my real vocation is literature.”
I left in a flash, with my stomach turning and the book in my hand. My wife was cheating on me with a South American mechanic with intellectual pretensions! That’s the thing about Spain: you pick up a rock and uncover a writer underneath. We’re a country of Quixotes, poisoned by novels. It starts by abusing literature and ends by cooking with liquid nitrogen.
After that terrible blow, I felt the moment had come for me to act but I contained myself: vengeance is best served cold, like a gazpacho frappé.
I came up with my plan that very night: the next day I drove my SEAT Panda to an isolated curve on Aguas Road. I walked down to a phone booth on Avenida de Vallvidrera and called the mechanic.
“Hello?”
“Don Sergio, my car stopped working again.”
“Don’t worry, buddy, I’ll come get you right away.”
Everything went according to my plan: I killed time smoking one Chester after another, looking out at the city’s detestable new skyline, until, forty-five minutes later, the indigenous guy showed up, loudly honking the horn of his rickety tow truck.
“Okay, bud, we’ll see what happened to your ride.”
It was getting dark as he stuck his nose in the engine. A car went by, then another. Then it was deadly quiet. I took the knife for slicing ham from the car, hid it behind my back, and slowly approached. I’d lifted my arm toward his neck when, all of a sudden, a car flew past at top speed and blinded me with its lights. I couldn’t repress a hysterical scream. My heart was beating out of my chest and, with my nerves on edge, the knife fell to the ground. The Colombian, alarmed, jerked his head up and hit it on the hood of the car.
“Goddamnit! That hurt! Why are you screaming?”
I realize I lost it at that point. I should have gone for the knife and done things right, but, afraid I’d lose the advantage I had with the element of surprise, I decided to slam the hood down on his head with all my might. The first blow smashed his face against the engine. But it wasn’t enough: I pounded him fifteen, twenty times, until he quit screaming and ceased moving. I’d made enough noise to wake up the entire city. But when I finished the job, not even a fly was buzzing.
After that I only remember flashes, until I got the damn Indian naked on the counter of the butcher shop. His face was a bloody mess and he wasn’t moving. I went to sharpen the machete, and when I came back to hack him to pieces, I found him sitting up, glancing around.