Read Online Southern Seas by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
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waiter by ordering a dish of local sausages, prawns and aubergines in a cream sauce, Tía Josefa partridges, and a milk pudding. He drank four carafes of the Jumilla house wine, asked to be given the partridge recipe, and thought once again that if the Thirty Years’ War had not sealed France’s hegemony in Europe, it might just be possible that French cuisine was currently passing under the hegemony of the Spanish. His only patriotism was gastronomic.
Without realizing it, he had walked all the way to the Rondas. He gazed at their decomposed geography, feeling hurt, as always, by the violation of his childhood landscape. Just as he was about to plumb the depths of self-pity, he went into a telephone booth and called Enric Fuster, his friend, accountant and neighbour in Vallvidrera.
‘You know the literary types at the university. Find me someone who can unravel the meaning of some Italian poetry. No. If I knew who it was by, I wouldn’t be needing to ring you.’
Fuster seized the opportunity to arrange a meal.
‘I’ll get in touch with Sergio, my fellow-countryman from Morella. He’ll make us a fine old meal. He doesn’t cook very well, but he’s always got good, fresh ingredients.’
Like the Chaldeans who thought that the world ended with the mountains that encircled them, Enric Fuster, along with everyone else from the Maestrazgo, thought that anything beyond his own horizon was intergalactic. Carvalho sat down to restore his strength for the evening. The white, acidic after-effects of drunkenness were wearing off. He was thirsty. He looked at girls in blossom and imagined what they would be like twenty years hence, when they too would have passed the forty-year meridian. He looked at forty- and fifty-year-old women, and imagined them as young girls playing at princesses. He remembered a poem by Gabriela Mistral.
And now to reconstruct a year in the life of a dead man. It seems grotesque. Every murder reveals that humanism has no existence in the real world. Society is interested in the dead man only in order to find the murderer and inflict an ‘exemplary’ punishment. If there is no chance of finding the murderer, neither the dead man nor the murderer has any further interest. Except to someone who has a good cry on your shoulder. Like children cry when they’ve lost their parents in a crowd. He started walking faster towards his parked car, but then he thought of the effort of driving off, finding the Marquess of Munt’s house, parking the car again, and then driving it home. He got into a taxi and began examining the driver’s ideological credentials. A medallion of the Virgin of Montserrat. Photos of a rather plain-looking family. A warning sticker: ‘Drive Carefully, Dad’. A little ribbon with the colours of the Barcelona football team. The taxi man was speaking Andalucian, and after two minutes’ conversation had already confided that he voted PSUC at the last general election.
‘What does the Virgin say about the fact that you voted communist?’
‘It’s my wife who’s into all that.’
‘Is she religious?’
‘Like hell! My wife, religious?! No. But she likes Montserrat, you know. Every year, I go to rent some cells at the monastery.Well, they call them cells, but they’re really hotel rooms. Simple, but very clean. There’s everything you need. So I have to rent them every May and go up there with my wife and children for three days. You probably think it’s a bit crazy given that neither of us pisses holy water. But she likes the mountain.’
They read Marx much of the night, and go to the holy mountain in spring.
‘I tell you, I’m the one who gets most out of it now. There’s a kind of peace up there. I get the urge to become a monk. And it’s incredibly beautiful, the mountain. Almost magical. How those stones stand up! For centuries, you know, for centuries. Before my grandfather was born, or his grandfather.’
‘Or your great-great-great-grandfather’s
Without realizing it, he had walked all the way to the Rondas. He gazed at their decomposed geography, feeling hurt, as always, by the violation of his childhood landscape. Just as he was about to plumb the depths of self-pity, he went into a telephone booth and called Enric Fuster, his friend, accountant and neighbour in Vallvidrera.
‘You know the literary types at the university. Find me someone who can unravel the meaning of some Italian poetry. No. If I knew who it was by, I wouldn’t be needing to ring you.’
Fuster seized the opportunity to arrange a meal.
‘I’ll get in touch with Sergio, my fellow-countryman from Morella. He’ll make us a fine old meal. He doesn’t cook very well, but he’s always got good, fresh ingredients.’
Like the Chaldeans who thought that the world ended with the mountains that encircled them, Enric Fuster, along with everyone else from the Maestrazgo, thought that anything beyond his own horizon was intergalactic. Carvalho sat down to restore his strength for the evening. The white, acidic after-effects of drunkenness were wearing off. He was thirsty. He looked at girls in blossom and imagined what they would be like twenty years hence, when they too would have passed the forty-year meridian. He looked at forty- and fifty-year-old women, and imagined them as young girls playing at princesses. He remembered a poem by Gabriela Mistral.
And now to reconstruct a year in the life of a dead man. It seems grotesque. Every murder reveals that humanism has no existence in the real world. Society is interested in the dead man only in order to find the murderer and inflict an ‘exemplary’ punishment. If there is no chance of finding the murderer, neither the dead man nor the murderer has any further interest. Except to someone who has a good cry on your shoulder. Like children cry when they’ve lost their parents in a crowd. He started walking faster towards his parked car, but then he thought of the effort of driving off, finding the Marquess of Munt’s house, parking the car again, and then driving it home. He got into a taxi and began examining the driver’s ideological credentials. A medallion of the Virgin of Montserrat. Photos of a rather plain-looking family. A warning sticker: ‘Drive Carefully, Dad’. A little ribbon with the colours of the Barcelona football team. The taxi man was speaking Andalucian, and after two minutes’ conversation had already confided that he voted PSUC at the last general election.
‘What does the Virgin say about the fact that you voted communist?’
‘It’s my wife who’s into all that.’
‘Is she religious?’
‘Like hell! My wife, religious?! No. But she likes Montserrat, you know. Every year, I go to rent some cells at the monastery.Well, they call them cells, but they’re really hotel rooms. Simple, but very clean. There’s everything you need. So I have to rent them every May and go up there with my wife and children for three days. You probably think it’s a bit crazy given that neither of us pisses holy water. But she likes the mountain.’
They read Marx much of the night, and go to the holy mountain in spring.
‘I tell you, I’m the one who gets most out of it now. There’s a kind of peace up there. I get the urge to become a monk. And it’s incredibly beautiful, the mountain. Almost magical. How those stones stand up! For centuries, you know, for centuries. Before my grandfather was born, or his grandfather.’
‘Or your great-great-great-grandfather’s
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