Skinny Carlos, Rabbit and Andrés scrutinized him from a table strewn with what could have been leftovers from a nuclear castastrophe: plates, bowls, serving platters, glasses and bottles of rum bled to death by the voracious, alcoholic appetites of those four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Josefina had thought of the idea of inviting Andrés tonight, who’d now become her general practitioner after a lot of new pain beset her three months ago, and, as usual, she’d anticipated the reasonable rather than random possibility that the Count, as starving as ever, would turn up – and then Rabbit also put in an appearance, he’d brought some books for Skinny, he said, and eagerly signed up for that priority activity, as he dubbed the repast well seasoned by the nostalgia of four Pre-Uni schoolmates now in the fast lane to forty. But Josefina wasn’t daunted – she’s invincible, thought the Count, when he saw her smile, after clasping her hands to her head for almost a minute, while the light of her culinary inspiration flashed: she could kill the hunger of that predatory foursome.
“Ajiaco sailor-style,” she announced, putting her banquet stew-pot on the stove almost half filled with water, adding the head of glassy-eyed stone-bass, two of the sweetest, off-white corncobs, half a pound of yellow malanga, half of white, and a similar amount of yam and marrow, two green plantains and others drippingly over-ripe, a pound of yucca and sweetpotato. She squeezed in a lemon, and drowned a pound of white flesh from that fish the Count hadn’t tasted for so long he thought it must be on the way to extinction, and, like someone keen to offload, she added another pound of prawns. “You could also add in lobster or crab,” added Josefina, like a witch from Macbeth before the stew-pot of life, finally throwing onto all that solid matter a third of a cup of oil, an onion, two cloves of garlic, a big pepper, a cup of tomato puree, three, no better four small spoonfuls of salt – “The other day I read it’s not as bad for you as they say, just as well” – and half a spoonful of pepper, almost completing that creation which had every possible flavour, smell, colour and texture, with a last quarter of a spoonful of oregano and another such of cumin, cast in the pot almost in a mood of irritation. Josefina smiled as she started stirring her concoction. “There’s enough for ten people, but with four men like you… My grandfather used to make this, he was a sailor from Galicia, and according to him this ajiaco is the daddy of all ajiacos and any day beats Castilian pisto, French pot-pourri, Italian minestrone, Chilean cazuela, Dominican sancocho and, naturally, Slav borsch, that hardly merits a place in this Latin stew competition. The secret lies in the mix of fish and vegetables, but you know, one ingredient is missing that you always add to fish: potatoes. You know why?”
Hypnotized by her magic incantation, gawping incredulously, the four friends shook their heads.
“Because the potato is hard-hearted and this lot is of more noble mind.”
“Jose, where the hell do you get all this stuff?” asked the Count, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
“Don’t be such a policeman and take the dishes to the kitchen.”
The Count, Andrés and the Rabbit voted to nominate it the world’s best ajiaco, but Carlos, who’d downed three big spoonfuls while the others were still blowing the steam rising from their bowls, pointed out critically that his mother had often cooked it better.
They drank coffee, washed up and Josefina decided to go to see the Pedro Infante film they were showing in the “History of the Cinema” because she preferred that story of tip-top Mexican cowboys to the argument the diners launched into with the first round of the night’s third bottle of rum.
“Hey, savage,” said Skinny after downing another line of rum, “do you really think the marijuana has to do with Pre-Uni.”
The Count lit his cigarette and imitated his friend’s alcoholic style.
“I don’t know, Skinny, I really don’t, but it’s my gut feeling. As soon as I stepped back into Pre-Uni I felt it was another world, another place, and I couldn’t see it like it was our Pre-Uni. There’s nothing stranger than going somewhere you thought you knew by heart and realizing it’s not what you’d imagined. I do think we were more innocent and kids now are more crooked or cynical. We liked to wear our hair long and be transported by our music, but we were told so often we had a responsibility before history that we finally believed we did and we knew we had to shoulder it, right or wrong? There weren’t the hippies or drop-outs there are now. This guy,” and he pointed at Rabbit, “spent the whole day harping on about being a historian and read more books than the whole history department put together. And this fellow,” it was now Andrés’ turn, “decided he was going to be a doctor and he is a doctor, and spent every day playing baseball because he wanted to get in the National League. And didn’t you spend your whole time chasing skirt and then get an average mark of 96?”
“Hey, Conde,” Skinny waved his hands, like a coach trying to stop a runner dangerously on course to a suicidal out, “what you say is true, but it’s also true there were no hippies, because they fumigated the lot… Every man jack.”
“We weren’t so different, Conde,” then Andrés intervened, shaking his head when Skinny went to offer him the bottle. “Things were different, that’s true, whether more romantic or less pragmatic, who knows, or maybe they treated us harder, but I think in the end life passes us all by. Them and us.”
“Listen to him speak: ‘less pragmatic things’,” Rabbit laughed.
“Don’t piss around, Andrés, what do you mean, passed us fucking by? You’ve done what you wanted to do and if you were never a baseball player, it was down to bad luck,” countered Skinny, who remembered the day when Andrés sprained his ankle and was out of his best championship. It was a real defeat for the whole tribe: Andrés’ injury put an end to all their hopes of having a pal in the dugout belonging to the Industriales, seated between Capiró and Marquetti.
“Don’t think that for one minute. What the hell happened to you? You don’t fool me, Carlos: you’re fucked and they fucked you up. I can walk and I’m fucked as welclass="underline" I never was a baseball player, I’m a bog-standard doctor in a bog-standard hospital, I married a woman who’s also bog-standard who works in a shitty office where they fill in shitty papers that people clean themselves on in other shitty offices. I’ve two children who want to be doctors just like me, because their mother has put it into their heads that a doctor is ‘somebody’. Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, Skinny, or talk to me about life fulfilment, or any of that crap; I’ve never been able to do what I wanted, because there was always something more vital on the agenda, something someone said I ought to do and which I did: study, get married, be a good son and now a good father… And the mad things, mistakes and mess-ups you should make in life? Hey, and this isn’t the bottle talking. Look at me… No, no woolpulling please, even you lot said I was mad when I fell in love with Cristina, because she was ten years older than me and because she’d had ten or how ever many husbands and because she did crazy things and must be a whore and how could I do such a thing to Adela, from Pre-Uni and such a decent, good natured girl… You forgotten? Well, I haven’t, and whenever I remember I think I was a big arsehole because I didn’t jump on a bus and go after Cristina wherever she’d holed up. At least I’d have made one a hell of a mistake for once in my life.”