For sad Jack London, the martini was a symbol of social ascent: going from whiskey to martini was like jumping from the frozen wastes of the Yukon to the drawing rooms of the Upper West Side.
Oh, no! What do we do now?
We close the bars!
On January 16, 1920, thirty-six states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale of alcohol.
Buñuel, who was in Los Angeles around that period, wrote in his memoirs: “I have never drunk as much as I did during the period of Prohibition.”
It lasted until 1934, when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the decree repealing it in the Oval Office of the White House, in front of the press. To drive home the point, he mixed the first legal martini for the cameras and the flashbulbs.
The dry martini entered literature and the cinema. Hollywood grabbed hold of it and the actors drank it like crazy. David Niven always had a glass in his hand. Marlene Dietrich only chose lovers who drank martinis (as she admitted once to Hemingway), and its short glass, like an upside-down umbrella, was reproduced in paintings, photographs, and advertisements. The one by Mel Ramos is famous: a naked woman sitting in a glass of martini.
The best verse was written by Dorothy Parker (hers is the brilliant phrase: “brevity is the soul of lingerie”). Her poem says:
I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under the host.
14
I graduated high school at the end of that year and enrolled to study philosophy at the National University. Mother took her head in her hands and started crying. Father said angrily, oh, my God, first the girl becomes a guerrilla and now this fool wants to become an intellectual, it’s like a disease! what did we do to have children like this, Lord? why are you trying our patience?
Whenever we were out on the street and Father saw beggars under a bridge, he would say, look, Manuel, a philosophers’ convention, is that what you want from life? you’re going to die of hunger! To stop him bugging me, I showed him an Internet page that said the philosopher Fernando Savater had been paid twenty-five thousand euros for a lecture. Father looked at it suspiciously and said, it isn’t possible, it must be a mistake or a fake, Manuel, you faked it, you can fake anything with the Internet… Who is this Savater?
The university! At last I was leaving that absurd high school behind. Getting out and spending my time with people similar to me was a blessed respite. Although not without its drawbacks. One mistake we make when we’re young is to believe that people who are interested in the same things as we are must necessarily be similar to us. Nature does its work, the spirit blows where it will. There are envious and wicked people even in worlds that we would think are dominated by clarity and beauty, but be that as it may, at the university I began a period of calm, intense reading, and for the first time felt that I was finding some kind of harmony.
The first semester passed, then the second.
Apart from my own classes, I loved to wander around the fine arts department, sometimes sneaking into one of the studios to see what they were doing. There too, surrounded by the smell of turpentine, in those spaces dominated by the sensual qualities of color and volume, I felt a great sense of peace, although I never regretted my choice. I was getting to know the world. Sometimes, when I left my classes late or stuck around for a talk in the lecture theater, I’d paint secretly on the walls of the faculty: letters, islands, storms, skies.
It was a period of long silences, Consul. My life had settled into a pleasant routine, and repeating it daily, without any upsets, was a genuine relief. Attending my classes, reading in the library, going to seminars and lectures, reading on the bus, reading on the lawns of the university, reading at home, going to the movies, scribbling in exercise books, taking notes. Life at home was the same as ever, but now I could also be a long way away. As I got used to the outside world, Mother and Father came to seem as if they belonged to another era, like an old sepia photograph.
Another semester passed, and another.
Sometimes Juana would come and find me after my classes and we’d have a glass of red wine in the cafeteria or go up to Chapinero for a bite to eat. I can still see her on the sidewalk, her hands deep in her pockets, shivering with cold in the wind coming down from the hills or avoiding the fumes from the buses. We’d eat whatever, Chinese food, fried chicken, pizza, and talk about my courses, the things we were both reading, movies, and sometimes also about politics, but while I talked or listened to her talking I felt something strange, a kind of premature nostalgia, as if in those chats of ours I already had a premonition of what was soon going to happen: her disappearance, the way that suddenly, without anything unusual happening, she stopped being among us, without a word, which was worse than if she’d died, Consul, because when someone dies you’re there, you witness their deterioration and are aware of the advance of death, its progress, and there even comes a time when you want it to come and set everyone free.
Juana disappeared without anything to suggest it was about to happen, although later, remembering those afternoons at the university, it seemed to me that a wind of anguish was already blowing our way, the urgency of something that was about to fall, because sad and tragic things do announce their coming, I believe, they don’t come just like that, they aren’t mere chance, don’t you agree? At least that’s how I remember it now, how I imagine it, even though I always end up wondering, what could she have feared in those years? I knew very little of Juana’s life. Her constant absences, coming back early in the morning, bursting into tears for no obvious reason, all that was a mystery. That’s how we remember people who disappear or die, everything that happened before seems bathed in a symbolic glow, an aura that, with hindsight, appears to be the forewarning of a tragedy.
I’ve observed that there are two ways to die.
The first is an illness that causes us to deteriorate and submerges us in a slow agony. That’s sad, but in a way it’s good for the relatives and friends, who have time to get used to the idea, although it’s painful to the dying person himself, because of all the pain, decay, and indignity it carries with it. The second is the opposite: a gunshot in the back of the neck, a brain hemorrhage, a traffic accident. Your relatives suffer but you go quietly. You go quickly to the other side. That’s the best way.
But there’s a third way, at least in our country, a way that’s cruel for everybody: disappearance. For everybody? The victim suffers from imagining the anguish of his nearest and dearest. The relatives suffer because they cling to any hope they can, and when it’s lost they suffer even more when they imagine the terrible loneliness of the death: someone kneeling in a patch of waste ground, in the early morning, shaking with fear, pissing in his pants, then two or three flashes and, already, a lifeless body falling into a hole, the earth covering it, vegetation growing over it and hiding it, the long suffering of those who spend years investigating, searching for that place, that horrible, monstrous place, trying to understand the reasons, the still inexplicable reasons, for what happened, why he was killed, to find his bones and clasp them and kiss them, trying to relieve the loneliness, to bathe it with tears.