“This is looking even better,” commented Manolo.
“What’s in the stuffing, Jose?” Tamara asked again.
“Five pounds of pork chunks, two and a half of ham, six or eight ground biscuits…”
“You added biscuits?” asked Carlos rather forlornly.
“Six raw eggs, an eighth of a pound of butter, a spoon and a half of salt and a quarter of a nutmeg, one apple, one melon pear, four stoned prunes, a quarter of a pound of roasted almonds and a small tin of truffles…”
“My God, truffles, I just love ’em…” the Count couldn’t restrain himself. “I could spend my whole life eating white truffles from Alba…”
“What on earth are truffles?” enquired Yoyi Pigeon, astounded by the Count’s recherché tastes.
“They’re little, titchy animals, with feathers and a few hairs on their head… How the fuck should I know!” replied the Count. “I’ve not seen a truffle, dead or alive, in my whole damned life.”
“We put all the ingredients together, stuff the turkey, put it on a tray and baste it with lemon, lard and crushed cloves of garlic. Put it in the oven at 350° for two hours, until it goes golden brown and dries completely,” Josephine took a breath. “It can be served in its own gravy or with strawberry, apricot or apple jam.”
“The Barata woman fucked up badly there,” interjected Carlos. “Keep that sweet stuff off mine…”
“Hey, watch your language, young man,” the Count complained, immediately adding: “Don’t put it on mine either, Jose. Give me gravy…”
“There’s enough for twenty people,” concluded Josefina to a fresh round of applause, and cries of “The days of plenty are upon us!” “Onwards and upwards”, “Industriales for champions!” and “Viva Josefina!”
“And is it all ready?” asked Conde.
“Yup. Candito got all the ingredients, Rabbit and Carlos were my kitchen porters…”
More applause and exclamations followed, but Carlos raised his hands and tried to put a brake on the general jubilation. When silence was restored, Skinny looked solemnly at his mother.
“Mum… you forgot something.”
“Oh, of course,” the old lady remembered, “I made a pot of rice and black beans, and prepared a bunch of fried ripe plantains, a salad of tomato, lettuce, avocado and cucumber… And a simple sweet: chocolate ice cream sprinkled with ground coconut and nuts…”
“Is this all for real?” asked Manolo, historically, rationally and politically unable to surface from his state of stupefaction.
“And I brought along a crate of red Rioja,” declared Yoyi, “plus four bottles of champagne…”
“The end of the world is nigh. Armageddon is upon us,” commented Candito.
“You must have been toiling all day, Jose,” Tamara sympathized.
“We’ve been on rice and beans for a week,” recalled Carlos, “and we’ve not had any meat since our last ration of one ninth of a chicken… which was, in the last century, right, mum? She was in need of some exercise.”
“How much did all that cost?” enquired Manolo and Conde jumped in: “Refuse to answer that, Jose. Let’s eat, for fuck’s sake. We rich guys don’t worry over a few cents here and there.”
“So how long will your wealth last you, Conde?” enquired Candito.
“At this rate…” Conde calculated, “eating out in paladares, using taxis, buying flowers, preparing banquets for a band of starving bastards… I’ll return to a state of poverty the day after tomorrow. But it was worthwhile being a rich man for three days, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was, for hell’s sake,” Carlos agreed. Now we can probably face another forty years of imperialist blockades and ration books with greater strength and courage than ever before…”
When he opened his eyes, Mario Conde wearily felt as if his body was a sack of potatoes someone had dumped down on the middle of his bed. His accumulated experience – what the more philosophical Rabbit, with enough memory to recall the disquisitions in Marxist manuals, would call “praxis as the criterion for truth” – was again demonstrating to him with a sly dig that, after a night of gorging and tippling, he could expect a rough awakening.
“And what are you doing here?” he asked when he went to find the second pillow and it moved: “Who invited you into my bed?”
In reply, Rubbish lifted a paw, demanding that a hand scratch his belly, stuffed with the latest leftovers from his owner.
On mornings like these, the Count had the overpowering sensation he was hurtling, at breakneck speed, towards the dreadful figure of half a century’s residence on earth. In that ascent – in effect one of his many descents, if not the most definitive – he had had to learn to coexist with his body, grow in awareness of its valves, axles, hinges and exhausts, in a way he’d not had to before his forty-fifth birthday. In his distant youth, after a boozy night, he might perhaps have suffered a headache, a rebellion in his stomach he resolved by expelling shit – in his case, generally, a lot of shit – and a shooting pain in his knee because of the way he’d knocked against the sharp edge of the bed, he’d curse as a son of a bitch after each collision: but it was all transitory, cured by a quick shower, a couple of pain-killers and an anti-diuretic. Not any more: he now knew, for example, that he had a heart where, as well as feelings and battle scars, there was a mechanism for pumping blood and, on certain post-orgy dawns, that pump galloped to the point he could feel it in his chest. He’d learnt he was the owner of kidneys which could hurt in the treacherous early hours; and he knew, sadly, that an ultra-alcoholic night required a whole day – this time he thought it would take two – to guarantee physical and moral recovery. For his body now refused to simply process the doses of rum it had received in a few hours, and instead wreaked its revenge in the most varied, cunning ways…
But the previous night could be etched in letters of gold among his memorable experiences, because not even Manolo’s news that there was no trace in the police files of a person called or nicknamed Violeta del Río could dampen the Count’s joy as he surveyed the turkey’s bare rib cage, the bottles of rum, beer, wine and champagne that had been cheerfully emptied of their contents, and witnessed the obvious delight he’d given his friends, in particular Skinny Carlos.
With two painkillers in his stomach, a cigarette on his lip and a double espresso in his fist, he went out on his terrace and remembered that, when he’d arrived in the early hours, Rubbish had been waiting for him, as if he too had been expecting to partake in a banquet.
“Rubbish, don’t get too used to this. When the party’s over, we’ll be back to the usual…”
As he watched the animal yawn, while a back leg tried to shake off a particularly annoying flea, Conde vaguely envied this dog that, despite its age, seemed ready to resume life every morning. For a moment he reflected that he should stop postponing the decision to take exercise and reduce his daily quota of cigarettes to a single packet, but shelved this thought immediately, as he realized that if he made the effort he might still have time to meet Katy Barqué before going to the rendezvous agreed with Silvano Quintero the journalist. Right then he was forced to recognize that the basic impulse fuelling this super human sacrifice was an unhealthy curiosity demanding to know – in a quite disproportionately violent fashion – more about Violeta del Río.
“I’ve always said this: you need two things if you want to sing boleros: a heart this size for all that feeling, and steel-plated, blockbuster ovaries. Your voice is the least of your worries… And it’s a fact that, apart from this voice that God gave me and preserves for me as if I were a young fifteen year old, I’ve always had more heart and ovaries than all the other singers put together, starting with Violeta del Río.”