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Where was he, the chef? The chef was out in a corner of the courtyard, busy with his morning preparations for the day’s cooking. And without a word she deposited the whole bunch of shelled chestnuts from the forests outside the riverport city among the other ingredients on his work counter. On this morning-between-frost-and-thaw, the chestnuts, too, appeared not merely “light or quince yellow,” but gave hints of that new color.

For that afternoon a wedding party was expected. By then she would be far away, and at the same time she would be present. If the previous evening the hostel had seemed about to close its doors forever, today it was filled with activity, as if this were its usual state and yesterday’s deserted atmosphere an illusion. One delivery man after another appeared, and not only from the nearby yet invisible Tordesillas, but also from Madrid, and from the Galician fishing ports. In between even a refrigerated truck from a distant foreign country, with river crayfish, perch, and pike; where could they possibly come from? and then a little hand-drawn cart with rather wizened mountain apples and potatoes, which had come a long way, from the Sierra de Gredos. At the same time, arriving from all points of the compass, crews of masons, carpenters, and roofers, who promptly went to work.

She would not be there to see the outcome, and yet she would be: by the time the wedding party arrived, the dive would look more or less like a castle again. In the midst of all this a postman appeared with a stack of mail, for the innkeeper, for the guests, but also for her, a letter from her brother, written while he was still in prison. Almost at the same moment an itinerant knife sharpener turned up and sharpened the innkeeper’s knives on his grindstone, driven by a foot pedal, and her scissors, at no charge. And then at one point a soldier came by, in uniform and armed, but without a cap — hair flying and face flushed—, bummed a cigarette and rushed on, searching for his lost unit?

With the change in circumstances on his property, the innkeeper had also become a different person. He had risen at the crack of dawn, while the others were still sleeping, to get to work on his cooking. He felt as if he were doing these things for his many children. Standing on one leg, shifting, while cooking, from one leg to the other. Chefs, the race of one-leg-standers. Even throwing his whole body into it when washing up. His pleasure at the heat rising from the stove. Applying final touches, to the nonedibles as well. Letting the seasonings fly to him — his elegance an additional seasoning. The chef, a different kind of embodiment. His cooking performance as a performance of the world.

Now it stimulated him to have someone watching. While peeling, grating, slicing, dicing, and turning, he repeatedly stood up and strode back and forth in his courtyard work corner, constantly busy, less a chef than an athlete, gathering strength for the competition. She assisted him, or rather: she was allowed to assist him, if only peripherally, by bringing a bucket of water, for instance, and collecting the trash. In between, the moment arrived when she was finally allowed to hand him her present; he took it matter-of-factly and ran one hand over it, while with the other, his left hand — a left-handed chef — he continued with the preparations for the wedding feast. This was a period in which women were more likely to give men presents, and what presents, too, and — at least where this woman was concerned — without ulterior motives. And meanwhile he was also cooking up a stew, on the side, for a mortally ill neighbor on the meseta. The man’s child then carried the heavy ceramic pot home to his father.

And worthy of describing was also the particular corner of the courtyard where the ventero (= innkeeper) was working that morning. There were remnants of the former park surrounding the castle, such as a box hedge and a small almond tree. But the ground already showed less of the gravel spread there long ago than of the reappearing sandy-stony-grassy subsoil of the steppe, yes, desert, along with the polygonal pattern of cracks caused by the dryness. It was indeed “bel et bien,” a corner or nook formed not by the castillo but by two sheds standing at an angle to one another, nowhere near a right angle, one shed half-finished, evidently left that way for centuries, the other half in ruins.

Next to the chef’s work counter in this corner, not hidden but clearly visible from the drive, the following items lay about: an old window frame, leaning against a door jamb; a pile of half-broken roof tiles; a rusty wheelbarrow; several large and small balls that had long since deflated; a rabbit coop without rabbits (only tufts of fur caught in the wire); a cement mixer, missing its cord, its drum full of hardened concrete; a stone-lined well with a pulley but no rope; an empty refrigerator missing its door; a child’s swing attached to a broken beam, with the seat’s single slat sticking up at an angle; a bathtub (the only object that was partly hidden, in the box hedge); a pyramid of animal bones — seemingly washed clean. A small open fire of knobby broom roots was burning in a pit, and roasting on a spit above it was a lamb, and she was allowed to turn the spit from time to time.

As was usual on the southern plateau, away from the mountains, the biting winter morning air yielded from one moment to the next — a leap that could be felt in body and soul — to a nonseasonal mild warmth. The chef on his work stool gazed at the woman through an opening in a knife handle, as she had gazed yesterday through the key bow, and said, “I have left the corner like this on purpose, and even arranged it this way. My nickname for it is ‘the Balkan courtyard,’ and if it were not so bad for business, I would also use that name publicly for the entire complex, with a neon sign up on the roof ridge: El corte balcánico. If the name scares off my guests, that’s not true of the thing itself, this place, this spot. On the contrary: you will see — even if you are not around to see it — that along with my cuisine and the name of my venta, El merendero en el desierto, The Snack Shack in the Desert, it is above all this courtyard that accounts for my popularity. Thanks to it, I was able to pay off the loan you gave me, ahead of schedule. All the tables in the three dining rooms have a view of my Balkan or Lithuanian or Lapp courtyard with its broken ladders, empty cable spools, and sideless baby carriages. Unlike the usual views of a park or the ocean, the nook offers a sense of reality, if perhaps a mournful or painful one, and helps the guests focus, while eating, on the thing at hand, on the important things, and thus makes them value eating here as something out of the ordinary and at the same time enjoy the food both heartily and lightheartedly. The people who seek me out need the view of this courtyard, even if they are not aware of that.

“And—” (a transition that was a specialty of the innkeeper’s?) “—you have, so I hear, commissioned someone to write the book about you. You did not want to write it yourself, and not only to avoid the first person. And the author was not to be a woman but a man, absolutely had to be a man, but why this one in particular? And now you want to, no, you must, head farther south, and, worse still, to the almost treeless Mancha, and are counting every hour, even this one here, until you are back home again, or at least over the roof-tile border, away from the curved southern tiles and back with your flat northern tiles! And at the expression ‘you must,’ you still have that smile.