“If you think I am going to remain a pathetic campesino, then you are mistaken,” he repeated when Manuel reminded him that they had a tradition to uphold.
“I do not want to sit in the mountains like a ranchero, eating beans and tortillas, come down to the village once a week and drink myself silly on aguardiente and just get poorer and poorer. Can’t you see that we are being cheated?”
Could he handle eight years of jail? Manuel feared for his brother’s life and health. To Patricio, being locked up was essentially a death sentence. When Manuel wrote to say that he was coming to Sweden, his brother had immediately replied that he did not want any visitors. But Manuel did not care. He had to find out what had happened, how everything had evolved, how and why Angel had died, and how Patricio could have been stupid enough to get involved in something as dirty as drug smuggling.
As the plane descended through the clouds, banked, and went in for the landing, Manuel’s thoughts returned to the mountains, his mother, and the coffee beans. How beautiful the beans were! When they had dried and lay in open, bulging jute sacks, wedged into every nook and cranny in the house, even next to their sleeping quarters, they invited his caress, and Manuel would slip his hand down into the strangely unscented beans and feel pure happiness filter through his fingers.
La vida es una ratita, he mumbled, making the sign of the cross and watching the foreign country spread out below him.
Two
Slobodan Andersson laughed heartily. His face split into a wide grin that revealed his tobacco-stained teeth. They resembled wooden pegs that had been filed down into needle-sharp weapons.
Slobodan Andersson laughed often and as yappily as a little dog, yet he was not what one would call a happy sort.
His enemies, and they had grown in number over the years, would talk disparagingly of “the lying poodle.” Slobodan did not appear to take offense. He would lift one leg and yap a little extra whenever someone reminded him of this nickname.
“The poodle,” he would say, “is related to the wolf.”
It was not only his face that was wide. All of him had swelled up over the past two decades, and he had an increasingly difficult task of maintaining the pace that had brought him both admiration and fear as a pub owner. What he had lost over the years in physical mobility he made up for in experience and a growing ruthlessness. He left people behind often perplexed and at times crushed, and he did this with an indifference that was not mitigated by any amount of laughter or backslapping.
His life’s story, which barflies in the city loved to tell and embroider with amazing additions, was full of obscurities, and Slobodan liked to support this with a mixture of unusually detailed and drastic anecdotes from roughly thirty years in the business, alternated with vague statements that were left open to interpretation.
What one knew for certain was that he had a Serbian mother and a Swedish father, but no one knew if they still lived, and if so, where. Slobodan Andersson was silent on this point. He would talk about his childhood in Skåne, how, as a fifteen-year-old, he began working at a well-known restaurant in central Malmö. He refused to utter its name, simply referring to it as “the joint.” He had spent his first three months there scrubbing and scouring. According to Slobodan, the head chef-”the German swine”-was a sadist. Others said that Slobodan, who advanced to sous chef, had stuck a fish knife in the head chef’s stomach. When asked about this, he laughed his poodle laugh and held his stomach. Opinion was divided on how this was supposed to be interpreted.
After various excursions to Copenhagen and Spain, Slobodan sailed into Uppsala’s culinary world and surprised everyone by opening two restaurants at the same time: Lido and Pigalle. Tasteless names, many thought, and the food received a similar evaluation. What the two watering holes also had in common was their expensive interiors. Lido was outfitted with a zinc bar counter eleven meters long, into which the customers were encouraged to engrave their orders with specially supplied screwdrivers. The screwdrivers were subsequently removed in connection with a brawl.
Pigalle was a dark hole of a place with an unsuccessful mixture of orientalism, incense, and dark drapes-and Mediterranean flair with fishing nets in the ceiling, shells, and a stuffed swordfish that brought to mind vacations in Majorca in the late sixties.
Both restaurants folded after barely a year. Slobodan Andersson salvaged the interiors, driving some things to the Hovgården dump but retaining that which might be worth something, and opened Genghis Khan, a restaurant with more potential from the outset. Genghis Khan did not gain a reputation for any culinary sensations. Instead it developed into a popular hangout, and now one started to perceive Slobodan’s talent for uniting a hip bar feel with an atmosphere that bordered on chummy. He often tended the bar himself, was generous and ruthless at the same time, knew how to choose favorites among his customers, those who were loyal and drew others in.
Genghis Khan went to its grave with a bang, or rather with fire and smoke, for in the end there was a fire in the kitchen. New kitchen equipment was purchased, but then there were three burglaries in a row and failed payments.
Slobodan left Uppsala. There were rumors that he had gone to Southeast Asia, others said the Caribbean or Africa. There was a rumor that he had sent a postcard to the federal tax enforcement agency. After a year, he returned, suntanned, with a somewhat reduced circumference and his head buzzing with new projects.
Suddenly there was money again, a lot of money. He tossed a couple hundred thousand in the direction of his creditors and shortly thereafter Alhambra opened its doors. It was the end of the nineties, and since then his restaurant empire had only grown.
Alhambra was located in an older building in the middle of town, a stone’s throw from the main square, Stortorget. The entrance was extravagantly appointed with custom marble on the stairs and hand-hammered copper doors engraved with the owner’s initials and the restaurant’s name in silver-colored looping letters.
Once inside, the impression became more muted. The suggestions for the interior from the chef, Oskar Hammer, were dismissed with a poodle laugh.
“Too cool,” Slobodan said, and stroked his emerging bald spot as he evaluated the sketches that Hammer had commissioned.
“There should be razzle-dazzle, bling, lots of gold.”
And so it was. Many decided that the effect was so consistently pursued that it achieved a measure of style. The gold and magenta walls were profusely covered in sconces and blurry prints in wide, white frames. The prints all displayed motifs from Greek mythology.
“The name of the restaurant is, after all, Alhambra,” Slobodan said, when Hammer raised objections.
The tables in the dining room were set in a rococo style with heavy silver-plated dinnerware and candelabras, procured by Armas, who had been Slobodan’s trusted assistant through the years.
Now Slobodan’s empire stood at the threshold of yet another venture. This time he turned to a new continent for inspiration. The restaurant was christened Dakar, and from the start, it worked. The walls were decorated with photographs from West Africa, some of them enlarged to nearly a square meter, depicting images from markets, daily life in the village, and sporting events.