On the Edge (20 page)

beatus ille
, he has, in the serenity of his mature years, embraced scorn for the court and praise of the village. Here the days and months pass, and there’s not so much as a hint of Francisco’s former alliance with that ruthless, voracious elite, no sense of what was once the very hub of his existence. It’s as if nothing had happened between us or within us since those shared years of childhood and adolescence; I even find myself believing it, I can even understand why he bought that house, after all, who doesn’t want the perfect place in which to spend his declining years, a luxurious monastery, until, that is, you go to Misent with him one day, and, as if by chance and after much random wandering about, we find that our walk—apparently unplanned—has led us to the marina. And he distractedly raises one arm and points, saying, look, Esteban, just perfect for a little trip around the bay one morning, his finger still pointing, inviting me to look, and what he’s inviting me to look at, what, according to him, is
just perfect for a little trip around the bay one morning
, is a sailboat moored in the port, an elegant sailboat that turns out to be his, the little boat he’d mentioned once, as if in passing, while you were discussing something else, and whose existence you’d completely forgotten about, because you didn’t believe there was much truth in it: a little boat, you assumed, the kind that any guy could afford during the boom years, what people call a motorboat and which is little more than a dinghy. But no, you suddenly realize that the reason he’s taken you on this excursion is so you won’t die without seeing it, yes, he has to make sure that the carpenter sees it, he has to deliver the coup de grâce before the carpenter bites the dust of a natural death, pretty much as a matador does with a bull, finishing the animal off quickly before the spectators start booing because the bull is taking too long to die, and as we all know, no one is so young that he might not die tomorrow, so it’s just as well that the carpenter should see the sailboat and feel envy and pain and sadness, I may have lost Leonor—except that you lost her first, I think to myself. I wonder, did he ever find out about us? Did Leonor ever tell him? I don’t believe so, a relationship with no added value is just a piece of junk you get rid of—but I have a beautiful house and a sailboat (it’s like that nursery rhyme: I have, I have, but you have nothing, I have three sheep, one to milk and another to keep), and so he invites you to jump on board, you walk across the teak deck, he takes you down to the saloon with its kitchen and its dining table, which is laid as if for some imminent banquet, and the little bar with its shelves of bottles, and he opens the door of the bathroom, and then shows you the two bedrooms, holy shit, this is just amazing, says the artisan, the cuckolded St. Joseph, so skilled at planing a piece of wood, who climbs up a few steps to see the screens of blinking lights on the instrument panel. It’s very comfortable, says Francisco, adding for further emphasis, yes, it really is very comfortable. As if I were trembling with admiration and emotion and pride just to know that what I see and touch and caress belongs to my old friend, my traveling companion, and as if he wanted to bring me back down to a modest reality. There’s the plain language he uses as proof: yes, she’s a cozy old thing. You can sail her or use the motor, she’s got a 200-horsepower engine. But this cozy old thing isn’t moored in the harbor built by the town council for the small boats of those who define themselves as the new middle class and who are, in fact, a conglomerate of variants of the conscienceless working-class created by Thatcherism and which the current crisis is sweeping away, taking them down a notch or two, and, as a consequence, many of the small boats moored in that popular, municipal harbor now have cardboard signs saying
FOR SALE BARGAIN PRICE
. No, Francisco doesn’t have his yacht moored there, but in the Marina Esmeralda, where the yachts of German or Gibraltarian or Russian millionaires rub shoulders, ninety-foot-long boats that belong to traffickers of something or other—sausages, mass-produced bread and cakes, works of art, money or weapons—yachts owned by builders who’ve put more tons of cocaine into the market than they have cement; launderers of dollars, euros, pounds. Is there anyone in that marina who has earned an honest living, apart from the waiters, who, tray in hand, ply the quayside bars, alongside the shops offering yachts for sale at more than half a million euros? And even those waiters can be rather alarming if they happen to meet your eye while pouring out the whisky-on-the-rocks you ordered. They’re not waiters, they’re thugs, bodyguards, dealers in stolen goods and illegal substances, pimps, hitmen, mules, drug smugglers, the rent boys of yacht owners, the servants of smarmy mafiosi who, when interviewed on the local TV news, describe themselves as owners of nocturnal marketing businesses. Yes, Francisco, that’s what
le grand monde
is. I know the good life is essentially contrary to the law and to justice, and is rigorously incompatible with charity, but life is short, and no one is so young that he cannot die tomorrow and no one so old as to think he cannot live another year. Do you remember that quote? You studied philosophy at university and you read it out to me once, to this idiot whose father was forcing him to be an artist and who didn’t know what he wanted to be, but knew absolutely what he didn’t want to be. In showing me his yacht—as when he showed me his house—Francisco is confirming that for him the rustic life—playing cards at the Bar Castañer included—is merely a game in a toy shop, and that these are the rules imposed by the game he has chosen to play, like in the game of the goose, where, if you land on a square with a goose on it, that allows you to jump over your competitors; or when you play Battleship, you call out the number and letter of the target square and the other player says hit or miss, and you can then either cross it out or not: every game has its rules, rules that are only valid for as long as the game lasts, and that’s certainly so in his case, the rules governing his game as humble villager last only as long as the evening round of cards, and those rules no longer obtain (one day, we really must share a fantastic peaty whisky I’ve put aside especially for us, he says, closing a small wooden door) when he allows you a second viewing of his house, the now restored Civera house; and the carpenter who never even made it to cabinetmaker grade sees the furniture: kingwood, rosewood, mahogany, the glass cabinets in which Francisco keeps ancient volumes bound in silk or shagreen, then there are the paintings by Gordillo, engravings by Tàpies, watercolors by Barceló and Broto. But all this must be worth a fortune, I say, and he laughs, yes, I haven’t done too badly, I’ll tell you about it some time, and so with him I always have the impression that when he talks about the people he hates (he specializes in public rants against unscrupulous businessmen and unethical bankers, fulminating against the mad speculative property bubble of the last few years, although not, of course, when he’s with Pedrós, Justino or Bernal), he is, in fact, inveighing against himself, shitting on his own biography—the cosmopolitan Mr. Hyde versus the card-playing country bumpkin Dr. Jekyll. But all this paints a very hasty, even clumsy portrait. We need to delve back into his past as a young Catholic with a social vocation, a member of JEC, JOC and HOAC and so on. He even considered becoming a seminarian; he yearned for justice, aspired to a universal, egalitarian happiness, well, who didn’t at the time, with all that talk of liberation theology: becoming a worker-priest in Franco’s Spain or a guerrilla priest—as Camilo Torres went on to be—somewhere in Latin America, but his cock was made of a material all too susceptible to the magnet of sex, a psychophysiological remora that many priests manage to transform into a precious pastoral tool thanks to the invaluable collaboration of that authentic network of erotic contacts—the confessional; although what closed that particular path to him was, I believe, his realization that power within the Church was being offered to him as a very demanding fruit, born of a combination of overly complex codes and rhetorics, strict regulations, and, at the same time, certain very subtle movements, insinuations, hints, a slightly raised eyebrow, an imperceptible pursing of the lips. He preferred to take more direct action than was usual among the clergy, whose complicated labyrinth, designed on baroque lines, was the legacy of the Council of Trent, which required that any advances should be made very slowly indeed; going through the motions of submitting to the hierarchy, engaging in secret intrigues, irrational surrenders or acts of obedience, too much whispering and not enough shouting, and shouting was precisely what politics offered him when he took it by the horns in the late 1970s: politics, it must be said, was a far franker world, its tactics and strategies more overt (the very opposite of his father’s modus operandi), and one’s own image had a public dimension, true, Francisco’s first steps were taken in the age of clandestinity—even though the transition had already begun—but all the people involved knew each other, and there were no secret negotiations in the corridors of parishes, sacristies and archbishops’ palaces: you ran the cells, you held semi-clandestine meetings and you gained a certain prestige, still under your nom de guerre, while the dictatorless dictatorship continued to crumble, but once democracy was in place, that was it—stripped of your nom de guerre, you appeared under your real name, and with this one slogan, politics as the supreme and almost unique value, far superior to any other form of social activism: you would climb onto the platform and shout, your shouts amplified thanks to a superb sound system (paid for by your Swedish, German and French comrades, social democrats showing their solidarity with the anti-Franco struggle) and accompanied by drums and flutes played at full blast,
a desalambrar, a desalambrar
,
dale tu mano al indio
,
dale que te hará bien
—and this was a real going out into the world, not spending your life shuffling around gloomy sacristies, dark corridors and damp offices full of crucifixes and paintings of martyred or wounded saints, pale as boiled chard, darkened by hundreds of years of exposure to the smoke of candles that appeared to be made of the same yellowish substance as the faces inhabiting those rooms, places on the very borders of the dread continent of eschatology: a narrow frontier where the living merge with the dead, down a path between today’s shadows and the deep abyss of the shadows waiting for us just around the corner. Although, in reality, as long as he remained involved in politics—or, later on, in his professional life as a writer or businessman or whatever he was—he still appeared to behave like a priest, and showed a definite penchant for secret meetings and behind-the-scenes scheming: he carefully hid the tips of his fingers when he was pulling the strings, a born operator, that was what his fellow party members called him: he showed his eyes, full of convincing, encouraging fire; his lips, from which proclamations issued forth; his chest which filled with air when he was about to bellow out the relevant slogan, but he always hid his nimble hands, capable of pulling dozens of different strings at once. He would tell me all this with great amusement, proud of his own deviousness. It was quite safe to tell me; after all, I knew no one to whom I could pass on the information. His taste for intrigue has never left him: when he abandoned politics, he went on to manipulate a number of winery owners from behind the tasting tables, because the price of their wines depended in large measure on the points awarded them by
Vinofórum
, the magazine he ended up editing, having stabbed a few rivals in the back, rivals who, it seems—at least according to him—resisted with unusual ferocity, resorting to an email war, sending the then editor reports linking Francisco to all those wineries who were paying him for his services, and with whom he, with jesuitical sangfroid, denied ever having had any contact (it’s a specialty of his correligionists, whether religious or political, to do the opposite of what they say, and not to let the left hand they’re showing know what their thieving right hand is up to); from the dark den of the magazine’s office in which he had taken refuge as a fugitive from political intrigues, he rose as inexorably as a bubble in a glass of champagne, until he reached a prominent position on the board of the editorial group (the surface of the champagne, from which one can see—as if from a high-angle camera—the other bubbles rising up from below: the office was on the thirtysomethingth floor of a skyscraper in Madrid’s elegant Paseo de la Castellana), producing magazines, wine guides, publications about hotels and restaurants, a couple of monthly travel magazines (one for upscale clients and another for downmarket clients: on the cover of the former the ten best hotels in the world; on the latter the ten best-value campsites on the Costa Dorada), as well as a stake in various hotel chains and wine and spirits distributors. He told me about this on his visits to Olba, much as Stanley would tell his friends about his journey into darkest Africa. An exciting adventure. From there—and more to amuse himself than anything—he was at liberty to raise up to the skies or trample into the mud the faithful legions of chefs, who would distribute his photo among waiters and waitresses, who had been given express orders to raise the alarm the moment Francisco crossed the threshold: take a good look at this bastard and remember his face. As soon as he appears, tell me, we don’t want to let him escape (chefs weren’t exactly stars then, this was an earlier phase, when, as restauranteur Arzak said, chefs were just beginning to merit the same respect as engineers, architects and doctors). The chefs—like men on a Gothic altarpiece condemned to the fires of hell, surrounded by flames and prodded by a legion of kitchen boys in the guise of dark devils—scurried about among saucepans and ovens whenever the head waiter appeared in the kitchen to announce that the critic, Francisco Marsal, formerly known as
Pinot Grigio
, had just walked into the restaurant. He extorted money from oenologists who would work themselves to death experimenting with Merlots, Syrahs and Viogniers, foreign stock in which he believed and which he had recommended, assuring the oenologists that he would back them all the way in their experiments. You’ll get a ninety-three at the tasting table. Guaranteed. With a bit of luck, three or four points more. That would put you up there among the very best. It’s your choice whether you want to accept the offer. Afterward, they might or might not get a ninety-three: they would have to hold further discussions about the fine print, talk actual numbers, and then there were the ads in the magazines belonging to the group, the confidential contract to design their publicity campaign, including fold-out brochures and labels, establishing the all-important philosophy of the wine, and all this began with a suggestion that they change the original oenologist for another man who the publishing company was interested in turning into a media figure, following his appointment to a big consortium for a wine and spirits distributor with which the magazine had a close relationship, and which was, in fact, one of its main sources of finance. Francisco’s articles in the group’s magazines, his carefully honed “letters from the editor,” his judgments at tastings, all had quite a lot to do with consolidating the prestige of what are now some of the most expensive wineries. And he succeeded in transforming his wife from a cook who’d opened a small restaurant simply to stave off boredom into a gastronomic star: four tables and an oven, they said modestly when they came to Olba shortly before the restaurant opened in Madrid (I think that was the last time she came with him), something very simple, rather like those small bourgeois restaurants of yesteryear. I wish you’d come and see it, promise me you will, Francisco said, knowing that I would never dream of doing so. To start with, I had no suit, no tie. I had nothing that would satisfy the dress codes of the new age. Leonor sat silently beside him, as if we only knew each other by sight. Soon afterward, she was saying that standing in front of an oven in the restaurant was just an extension of her role as housewife, that’s what she said in the interviews her husband arranged for her in the color pages of the Sunday papers, while he traveled the world training his nose and taste buds on Burgundies, Rhine wines and Moselles. (I don’t know how you can taste anything. Your sense of smell must be completely fucked by all that cocaine. Don’t exaggerate, I only snort it once in a blue moon, when I come here, just so that I can switch off from everything and talk to you, ah, yes, the good old days.) And the crepinettes flavored with Piedmontese truffles, the Kobe beef carpaccio, and filling the cunts of five continents with whipped cream—specialty of the house. The housewife in her modest restaurant with just half a dozen tables became the first Spanish woman to be awarded two Michelin stars, as well as garnering the highest number of points in all the food guides, including the one published by