a la romana
if, like me, you’re Spanish, and the whole thing takes place at an ideal, pre-programmed temperature. With your final pill they give you a glass of champagne. But you’re looking very serious, Liliana, no, don’t take it like that, when I talk about paying someone, about buying that kind of care, don’t be offended, I’m not talking about you, you mean something quite different to me, you’re my child, what my sister Carmen was to my father, you’re very special to my father and to me: you’re family, a kind of belated daughter, there are three of us in the family now, two sad old men and one young woman who brings life into the house, I like to hear you singing when you’re doing the dishes, for instance, when you’re hanging out the clothes, you remind me of my mother, or hearing the radio when you have it on in the kitchen to keep you company while you’re doing the ironing, and I think my mother would have liked that too, although we can’t possibly know, because we can’t ask her, she’s not here, no, don’t cry, I feel like putting my arms around you, lifting your chin and making you look into my eyes. That’s it. But, Don Esteban, you know that even if you couldn’t pay me at all, I’d still come and see you both. You’ve already seen that nothing fazes me: I can wash and feed your father and do whatever else he needs me to, and it would be the same with you. For as long as I’m alive, this nurse, or if you’ll allow me, this friend, will always be with you. You know I like it when you call me “my child,” don’t you? Yes, I know, Liliana, now give me a little kiss and stop looking so sad. You’re not crying again, are you? It’s just that I love you as much as I do my own parents, or, rather, my mother, because my father took away any love I felt for him with the blows and the beatings. We’re not talking about love, are we, Liliana? Don’t trust that word. No, don’t take offense, I’m not saying that because of you, but it’s far better to say that we treat each other with mutual respect because we like each other, rather than love each other. And don’t even think about what might happen between us in the future. That’s what distinguishes liking from loving. We are the people we are today, and we’re living and sharing this moment and this same desire to weep today, because we understand each other, but tomorrow, who knows? No, Don Esteban, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, you can count on me until you die. You and your father are my family. I’d still come even if you couldn’t pay me. After all, what does money matter? I know, my child, but, Liliana, just look at my sister Carmen, my father’s beloved daughter, his favorite, she doesn’t even phone any more. She used to be so loving and affectionate, and now? Nothing. Who would have thought it, my father’s beloved favorite has turned out to be
nothing
. A stranger. Worse than a stranger, because with a stranger you can begin to have some fellow feeling for him or her, but here it’s the other way round, a fire has burned out, and a fire that burns out leaves the ground it burned on black with soot and there’s no getting rid of that stain. When they operated on my father’s trachea, she was here for only as long as was absolutely necessary: the day of the operation, she spent the night at the hospital, but the following morning, she said she had to leave: he’s out of danger now, it’s just a matter of recovering, they won’t keep him in for very long, they’ll probably discharge him tomorrow or, at most, the day after, they try nowadays to get patients out of hospital as soon as they can; besides, with the new, less invasive techniques they use, the incision leaves scarcely any mark, any scar, and the patient is better within a few days. And that was the sum total of her loving contribution. And off she went: Bye bye. Everything else, coping with the anxiety and the sleepless nights because he kept choking, using the blender to make the purées he could barely swallow, doing the laundry, getting him showered, dressed and undressed, changing his incontinence pads, all that was left to someone who didn’t love him and whom he didn’t love, someone who didn’t and still doesn’t like him. It was a mere prolongation of what we did in the carpentry workshop, of the way society functions. Do you see how commercial obligations bind people more closely than love? One of the many changing manifestations of that bad father, money. She cried repeatedly on the phone when I told her how our father was becoming a virtual vegetable. He couldn’t speak and appeared not to understand, he had to have everything done for him: he had to be washed, fed, helped into and out of bed. How sad. And she would cry. They loved each other. It really was very sad. It broke your heart. Those sobs down the telephone line. It even made me cry, and I don’t cry easily. But she still didn’t come and see him: all she sent were those tears. And just in case I didn’t pick these up over the phone line, just in case she failed to transmit them down the almost four hundred miles of copper and fiber wires separating us, she would break off halfway through a word, sigh, pause for a few seconds, clear her throat, begin to talk again, her voice hoarse now (one had to presume she was crying, had a lump in her throat, was uttering sorrowful sighs): You’ll have to find someone to help, you can’t look after him all on your own as well as work, cook, do the dishes, wash the clothes and hang them out. Of course I won’t be able to do that, of course I’ll have to find someone. But not a word was said about who was going to pay the eight euros an hour to that someone (who turned out to be you) or how much it might cost if I had to make special arrangements for that person to be here all day. Nothing but deep, sorrowful sighs. She behaved as if it were in bad taste to debase her grief with talk of money, as if it were unseemly to mix paternal love with filthy lucre, to apply an economic yardstick to love. No, love can’t be judged according to market values. It’s too personal, too private. It’s free of all ties. This isn’t a matter of money. Months later, when his bronchial tubes became blocked up and he had to be rushed to the emergency room and given oxygen, and was kept in the hospital for another week, I phoned to tell her, more in order to annoy her than because I thought she was actually going to give me any support, and, just as I imagined, all I got were excuses: her husband, her children, her work, the economy, everything was against her. She didn’t even bother to cry this time, but gave me a long litany of problems: I can’t take much more to be honest, later, when things calm down, I’ll tell you about the chaos my life is at the moment, we’ve got the workmen in, changing the old drains, and as you know, Pedro is too immersed in his work to help me, and so I have to deal with the plumbers, the bricklayers, and all the various traps they set for me and the dirt they leave everywhere, and how much they want to charge us, I’ve no idea where we’re going to get the money. Anyway, the fact is she never came. Poor thing, she had enough on her plate. She phoned about a week later, and before I could say anything, jumped in with: He’s better, isn’t he? (on that occasion, her voice was clear and hopeful, the voice of a bright, sunny morning—a winter morning like today, with that intensely blue sky above the lagoon—a cool breeze blowing away all trace of tragedy). And again: You have found someone to take care of him and look after him, haven’t you? You can’t possibly keep him clean, wash his clothes and cook his meals, not on your own. She was worried about our father and she was worried about me. And I was grateful for that. It was true, I couldn’t keep him clean, or sew the buttons back on his shirts or on his flies, which he would tear off if he got upset because I didn’t respond to his first imperative gesture, his first grunt; I probably wasn’t even capable of keeping myself clean, and the thought of that kept her awake at night. She came up with a solution: hire someone to look after you both. So considerate. Let’s hire someone to look after us, to keep us clean and well-fed. You see how easy it is? It’s assumed that I’ve been the major beneficiary in all family affairs, I have a house at my disposal, I’ve inherited a job and, above all, it’s assumed that I am the signatory for all the bank accounts. She was concerned about that too, the soul of generosity; she said: Given the state Papa is in, we’ll have to organize things so that we don’t have problems later on with the bank, so that they don’t freeze the savings accounts, and to make sure we all have equal access. I laughed: You’re not going to make Juan a signatory, are you? No, perish the thought, she said at once, he’d clean out the accounts in a week. And, of course, the point was that while she wanted my father and me to be kept nice and clean, she didn’t want the accounts to be equally clean, she wanted them to stay full of lovely green, yellow and purple banknotes, and when the time came for us to get hold of the money—what Carmen called cleaning out the accounts—that was to be done by the two of us, jointly. And then there are Germán’s children and his possible grandchildren, and his widow. They would also have to have access to the bank accounts. We can’t be the only ones to do that. That would be wrong, even illegal.
The assumption is that Dad is spending the money he has coming in and occasionally dipping into his savings, and that the two of us are getting the benefit of that. And I understand Carmen’s annoyance, her indifference, her caution. This isn’t a particularly appetizing dessert; the end of life’s banquet is not exactly sweet, but let’s not talk here about love. Do you understand, Liliana? No one likes the idea of living with a zombie who wanders down the corridor and sits staring at the TV screen, or who lies there, open-mouthed, when you lay him down on the bed, his vacant eyes fixed on the ceiling, a zombie from a real-life horror film who clicks his false teeth at you the way the skeletons do on the ghost train, and pushes them out with his tongue until you can see the teeth in their pink plastic, a zombie who still wolfs down his food and, above all (and this is the most unpleasant bit: a zombie-tamagotchi), continues to defecate twice a day (always assuming he doesn’t have diarrhoea). She, like Juan, like Germán’s widow and children, will turn up when the corpse has finally stopped twitching and it’s time to share out the treasure hidden beneath the skull. Then they’ll come to inspect the accounts, they’ll want to see the deeds of the workshop and the house, and of the former orange grove (now a potental building plot) and the piece of land in Montdor, where I would like to build a little house to retire to alone with my dog Tom, the two of us going for walks in the countryside, him trotting ahead and constantly stopping to wait for me, as he does when we go to the marsh, the two of us getting old together. He’s four years old and could have kept me company until the end. He’s got at least another ten or twelve years of life ahead of him, or did have; now he has only what the others have. And to grow some fruit and vegetables and fill a wicker basket with loquats, peaches, cherries, apples, quinces, and adorn the center of the table with those multicolored fruits, those fruits that Liliana says we don’t have here, to put them in a bowl, a fruit bowl on the table cloth, so that when you open the door, you’re greeted by the scent of ripe fruit. They’ll come and sit in the notary’s office and confidently discuss what they believe to be their legal share of the estate, having already booked a return flight home, convinced they can afford this extravagance because of what they’re going to get of the loot (the complete cleaning out of the accounts that the industrious Carmen suspects will happen, the sale of property). The living feed and grow fat at the expense of the dead. That’s nature for you. You only have to watch those wildlife programs on the TV, huge birds pecking at their victim’s innards and squabbling among themselves; the lioness picking at the bloody flesh of the zebra. But there’s no need to look to nature for examples; the gondolas in the supermarkets—that’s what they call them, gondolas, although they are, in fact, shelves—are grim cemeteries: shoulders of dead lamb, bones and steaks from a deceased ox, the viscera of a sacrificed cow, loin of electrocuted pork, all packaged in containers made from the remains of slaughtered trees. We live off what we kill. We live from killing, from what is served up to us dead: the inheritors consume the spoils of their predecessors, which nourish and strengthen them when it’s time to take flight. The more carrion they eat, the higher and more majestic the flight. And, of course, more elegant. And none of this is in any way at odds with the natural condition of the world.
When I get home, I’ll find him still sitting in front of the television, although what mood he’ll be in is hard to predict—people with dementia are prone to mood swings—so, on some afternoons, he’ll be quietly dozing, snoring away, his head bent over his chest, while on others, he’ll look at me, eyes glinting, needle-sharp, as if he were high on drugs or something: he kicks out when he sees me, moves his head back and forth, moans or grunts, and punches me in the chest and tries to punch my face too. Regardless of his mood, I have to untie the sheet, get him out of the armchair, warm up the food, put it on the table and serve it up, you’ll be having a late lunch today, Dad, so enjoy your few remaining hours; you may or may not know it, but it’s a lovely day; nature has put on all her finery to bid us farewell; winter has disguised itself as spring for us, and the weatherman is forecasting an equally bright day tomorrow. Enjoy your vegetables: one small potato, some chard and an artichoke, because vegetables are really beneficial to your health, artichoke is a diuretic and chard is good for the heart; fortunately, the market in Olba, though small, is very well stocked, and you can supplement products from the nearby farms with imported goods, plus the packaged stuff you can buy in the big local supermarkets: the day before yesterday, I looked at the bag containing the mixture of dried fruit and nuts—Exotic Cocktail, the label said—that I was munching my way through while I watched TV with you, and it turns out that the peanuts were from China, the corn from Peru, the raisins from Argentina and only the almonds, it seems, were Spanish: a true citizen of the world, a real cosmopolitan, that packager of tidbits, who, according to the tiny lettering which, even with my glasses on, I had difficulty deciphering, is a company from near here, from Alcásser or from Picassent, a village in the province of Valencia, I can’t remember where. Once fertile villages or villages in what was the once fertile province of Valencia, which, instead of green beans, tomatoes and broad beans, now produce plastic packaging for fruit cultivated and picked eight or ten thousand miles away. They’ve become the dormitory suburbs of the industrial estates surrounding them. Places full of nobodies: abandoned factories, closed warehouses, concrete esplanades where skateboarders careen noisily past empty cans and broken bottles. Doubtless located in one of those depressing industrial estates, the warehouse that packaged the dried fruits and nuts concentrates the energies of all five continents in the form of beans, peanuts, macadamia nuts, roasted chickpeas or corn. Where had those fruits and nuts been before they reached the plastic bag, in what warehouses and in what ports were they stored and how long had they taken to get here? Which company brought them here, piled up alongside what other merchandise? Pineapples packed with cocaine, valuable tropical timber that has lent them the smell of its resins, which is why the macadamia nuts have a very faint taste of cedar or pine, a taste that a wine connoisseur like Francisco would be quick to detect. And once here, in Spain, what other cargo were they stored next to? What other aromas have they retained from their long journey? Diesel? Acrylic paint? Rubber? Rat piss? Rubber, paint, rat piss and diesel: the smells of our contemporary
tristes tropiques
. The employee of the packaging company which opens and closes its doors in a non-place that was once fertile agricultural land, is surrounded by sacks that have come from other non-places situated in the four corners of the earth, and into the bag he puts a little of each, a pinch of sunflower seeds, another of roasted chickpeas, walnuts, pistachios, macadamia nuts, a few raisins, and, having finished his selection, he shrink-wraps the plastic bag, sealing together all those fruits and nuts into happy cohabitation as one heterogeneous, globalized, multicultural family. On the outside of the bag, each product is listed under the heading Ingredients, written in a font the size of fly droppings, which again obliges me to put on my glasses in order to decipher it. The size of the lettering doesn’t dissuade me, because I like to find out where things have come from, to know what I’m taking off the shelf (or gondola as they insist on calling it) and putting into my shopping cart and then transferring from the shopping cart to my car, from my car to the fridge and, finally, to my mouth. I like to know what I’m eating, what it is that’s going to share my inner life and make its home inside me. Whether you like it or not, the distance those products have traveled, the sense of alienation, inevitably arouses a feeling of distrust, which is perfectly normal (am I going to put
that
in my body?), who knows what food safety rules or non-rules exist in those countries of origin, but it also excites me to know that I’m biting into the fruit of a plant that someone grew and fertilized and picked in places I will never set foot in. While I savor the taste, I imagine the faces of the pickers: almond eyes, olive skins burned by the sun, the intent gaze of the women shelling the nuts, which, at this precise moment, belong exclusively to me: I’ve bought their intent gaze, their quick movements, the bead of sweat rolling down between their breasts while they work in a zinc-roofed warehouse. With each nut, each seed, each fruit, I’m eating the houses in which they live: small huts with corrugated iron roofs, bamboo shacks; the smell of chili in their stews (the stews that Liliana prepares in her five hundred square foot apartment, that she cooks and eats with her children and her husband), the smell of coconut and ginger, of the forests or jungles that surround those places where the pickers of my afternoon snacks live. That—eyes, skins, landscapes, lush vegetation—is what I’m eating, what delights and nourishes me. Another day, I noticed that, on the shelves in the fruit section of Mas y Mas, even though we were in September—harvest time for the sweet, perfumed local muscatel grapes—the white grapes they were selling came from Argentina (but if it’s September here, isn’t it springtime in Argentina—are there grapes in springtime?). I’ve no idea what variety they could have been: large, golden grapes, glossy and insipid; and the little bundle of green asparagus almost always bears a strip of paper declaring its Peruvian origins. Peru isn’t a country you ever think about, it rarely comes up in conversations in the bar, it’s a country no one ever mentions, and yet you just happen to read what’s printed on that strip of paper and there it is: Country of origin: Peru. You think: did we Europeans take asparagus to America or did they already grow it there and did the Incas eat it at the banquets they held among those enormous carved stones that appear in TV programs about Cuzco and Machu Picchu? Which came first, chicken or egg? And there on the counter is a piece of really fresh fish: before you buy it, you have to choose, scrutinize the tiny letters on the tiny label intended to make it as hard as possible for you to find out where it comes from, but on which the price is perfectly legible: €6.50, €8.50, €9.25, €14.35, followed by North Atlantic South Atlantic Pacific Arctic Chile Indonesia Peru Ecuador India; port of unloading Marin Vigo Burela Mazarrón: good God, what a journey they’ve taken those hake, those anglerfish, those Hindustani prawns. For us, Dad, I always try and buy the fish you imagine would be the freshest, caught off our own coast and unloaded in one of our ports, although our fishermen—doubtless mindful of the Andalusians and the trouble they’ve had about who could or couldn’t fish for hake and plaice in the Bay of Cádiz—have, for a while now, been claiming that their catch comes from the Bays of Misent, Calpe, Peñiscola or Alicante, and those—which one assumes were caught here—are given special labels—
RED MULLET FROM THE BAY OF MISENT, PRAWNS FROM THE BAY OF DENIA, OR GROUPER FROM THE BAY OF ALICANTE
—and you end up paying far more for them, and suddenly it turns out that every bay is one in which wild fish graze, which means that you and I have to pay more for them. Buy fish caught locally. That’s what the government-sponsored TV ads say, as if the fish had their own health insurance card just as we bipeds do, and paid their local taxes. Stonefish,
mavra
, parrot fish, bar jack,
roig
,
furó
. The delicious oil to fry it in, brought from the Sierra de Mariola, or, even better, from the Sierra de Espadán, the one bottle I have left in the house. Come on, eat up. That’s your job, to eat and take your pills—I had my own chemical menu at breakfast; for you, it’s six pills in the morning, preceded by the miracle-working omeprazole (so cheap and effective anyone would think it had been made by those Soviets you dreamed of in your youth), four at midday and four (or is it five?) at night, now sit on the toilet and try hard, that’s something I can’t do for you, go on, squeeze, but keep calm, we have all the time in the world, don’t get agitated, just stay calm, but don’t stop squeezing, okay? Keep relaxed but squeeze, don’t make me have to give you an enema on this our last night. And once you’ve done your work, completed your task, just watch the TV and don’t hassle me. Not tonight. Although I don’t really need to encourage you to eat, you’ve never lost your appetite. Not in all these months. That’s another of your contradictions: so little interest in life, but such an appetite for food. Can you explain that? You’ll die ruminating, chewing, grinding your false teeth. A little oil drizzled over the potatoes and the green beans, I know you like that, you always have. The Mediterranean sun is concentrated in those golden drops, bringing health and life. For some years now, everyone has agreed that each drop of oil is packed with energy, with hope, the balm with which Greek athletes and Roman patricians anointed themselves, with which the church anoints the dying, the fruit of that sacred tree—like olive shoots around your table, Lord, they sing in the Catholic mass. That’s what they tell us on the radio, on the TV, in the newspapers. It’s the other fats that are dangerous: things like margarine, animal fat, butter, whole milk; and other oils too: sunflower oil, peanut oil, palm oil, corn or soya oil, the kind of oils eaten by those poor black people with vast bottoms, tremulous as a jelly on a plate, who drag themselves around the streets of New York and who we see on TV; huge black women, hippopotami on two feet, whose thighs rub together when they walk and cause sores to form; not to mention the elephantine white failures, reeking alcoholics with a purple nose and cheeks covered with a network of purplish veins, people about to lose their jobs or their homes or who have already lost them and now form part of the hopeless hordes, bodies that can’t even sit down on the bus because their buttocks overflow the seat and their belly is too large to fit in the space between them and the seat in front, however wide they open their legs in a vain attempt to make optimum use of space, individuals who turn up wearing shapeless tracksuits, talking to a TV presenter and explaining that the bank has repossessed their house because they can’t pay back the loans they signed up for when they weighed a few pounds less and could still go to work. Go on, Dad, eat up, have a slice of that omelette perfuming the air with the smell of good honest olive oil. Good cholesterol—that’s what the scientists say—to help the blood flow unobstructed through the arteries. The holy supper, the last supper. Most of the houses in Olba had that picture hanging on their dining-room wall, in frames made of metal or porcelain, engravings of the original painting by Juan de Juanes. Jesus with his twelve apostles, the traitor sitting diagonally across from him, holding his money bag behind his back. We never had that kind of garbage in our house, and so yes, there are things I should be grateful to you for.