Southern Seas Read online

  ‘Careful, Sergio, this guy burns books. He uses them to light the fire.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘It must give extraordinary pleasure.’

  ‘There’s nothing to beat it.’

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll start to burn this shelf. Without even looking at what books are there.’

  ‘It gives even more pleasure if you choose them.’

  ‘I’m a sentimentalist, though. I’d be sure to reprieve some of them.’

  In the kitchen, Fuster marched up and down like a sergeant major inspecting Beser’s work. The ingredients had been cut into pieces that were too large. He groaned, as if wounded to the quick.

  ‘What the hell’s this?!’

  ‘Onion.’

  ‘Onions in paella! Where did you get an idea like that! Onion makes the rice go soft.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. They always use onions in my village.’

  ‘In your village, you’d do anything to get yourselves noticed! Onion can be used in a fish or salted-cod arroz cooked in a casserole. In a casserole, do you hear?’

  Beser stormed out and returned with three books under his arm: the Valencian Gastrosophic Dictionary, Gastronomy of Valencia Province, and A Hundred Typical Rice Dishes of the Valencia Region.

  ‘Don’t come to me with any book that’s not written by someone from Villores. To hell with you Morellanos. I go by the memory of my people.’

  Fuster raised his eyes to the kitchen ceiling and held forth:

  ‘O noble symphony of all the colours!

  O illustrious paella!

  O polychromatic dish

  eaten by eyes before touching the tongue!

  Array of glories where all is blended.

  Divine compromise between chicken and clam.

  O contradictory dish

  both individual and collective!

  O exquisite dish

  where all is fair

  where all tastes are as distinct as the colours of the rainbow!

  O liberal dish where a grain is to a grain

  as a citizen to the suffrage!

  Beser pored over his books, ignoring Fuster’s poetic outburst. Finally he closed them and laid them aside.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You were right. Onion isn’t used in the paella of the people of Castellón. It was a lapse. A catalanism. I’ll have to go to Morella. I’m in urgent need of a refresher course.’

  ‘Ha!’ exclaimed Fuster, as he threw the onion into the rubbish bin. ‘I made myself quite clear. Half a kilo of rice, half a chicken, a quarter-kilo of pork shoulder, a quarter-kilo of peas, two peppers, two tomatoes, parsley, saffron, salt, and nothing else. Anything else is superfluous.’

  Fuster set to work, while Beser plied him with little pieces of fried bread with chorizo and Morella blood sausage. Beser took out a bottle of Aragón wine, and glass followed glass like a chain of buckets damping down a forest fire. Fuster had brought from the car a greasy cardboard box which he handled as if it contained precious objects. Beser, impatient to discover the contents, suddenly shouted with enthusiasm:

  ‘Flaons! Did you make these for me, Enric?’

  They embraced like two compatriots meeting at the South Pole, and explained to the by now inebriated Carvalho that flaons are the absolute best patisserie to be had in all the Catalan lands. Throughout the Maestrazgo, they are made with oily dough, aniseed and sugar, and filled with curd cheese, ground almond, egg, cinnamon and grated lemon peel.

  ‘My sister sent them yesterday. Curd cheese is very awkward and goes off very quickly.’

  Beser and Fuster caught the aroma coming from the paella.

  ‘Too much pepper,’ Beser suggested.

  ‘Wait till you taste it, idiot,’ replied Fuster, bending like an alchemist over his retort vials.

  ‘A few snails to add the final touch. That’s what’s missing. Pepe, today you’ll have a real paella from its homeland, the one they used to make before fishermen corrupted it by drowning the fish in roux.’

  ‘It’s a good thing you eat it yourself.’

  ‘It’s because I’m studying anthropology.’

  They put the paella on the kitchen table, and Carvalho prepared to eat it country-style, without plates, simply demarcating a portion of territory within the container. In theory it was a paella for five people, whose only effort would be to keep themselves well lubricated. They finished the five-litre bottle of wine, and began another. Then Beser brought out a bottle of Mistela de Alcalá de Chisvert for the flaons.

  ‘Before you can no longer tell a sonnet from a piece of the telephone directory, you must solve the problem my detective friend wants to consult you about. By the way, I still haven’t introduced you. On my right, Sergio Beser, a mean, red-haired son of a bitch weighing in at seventy-eight kilos. On my left, Pepe Carvalho. How much do you weigh? Sergio’s the man who knows more about Clarín than anyone. So much so that if Clarín came back to life, he’d slaughter him. Nothing literary is beyond him. What he doesn’t know, I do. “Robust slaves, sweating from the kitchen fires, left the first-course delicacies on the table, on huge plates of red Sagunto terracotta …” Who’s that by?’

  ‘Sónnica the Courtesan, by Blasco Ibáñez,’ said Beser petulantly.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘When we’re going to get drunk, you recite Pemán’s ode to paella; and when you are drunk, you come out with the banquet that Sónnica organized in Sagunto for Acteon of Athens.’

  ‘ “Each diner had a slave in attendance behind him, and from the crater they filled the cups for the first libation.” ’ While Fuster continued with his solitary recitation, Carvalho produced the sheets of paper on which he had typed Stuart Pedrell’s literary hieroglyph. Beser suddenly assumed the gravity of a diamond specialist, and his diabolic ruddy eyebrows rose, bristling, to the challenge. Fuster stopped to fill his mouth with the last flaon. Beser rose to his feet and walked round his guests twice. He drank his Mistela, and Fuster refilled his glass. The professor recited in a low voice, as if trying to memorize the lines of verse. Then he returned to his chair and left the paper on the table. His voice was as cool as if he had been drinking iced water all evening, and as he spoke he rolled himself a cigarette of light Virginia tobacco.

  ‘The first line is no problem. It comes from T.S.Eliot’s Waste Land. My favourite line in the poem is: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” But that’s not got a lot to do with the business of going south. I don’t want to bore you, but I should say that the myth of the south, as a symbol of warmth and light, of life and the rebirth of time, is a very common theme in literature—particularly once the Americans discovered it as a cheap place to spend their holiday dollars.

  ‘The second fragment is also rather obvious. It’s from The South Seas—the first poem published by Pavese, an Italian poet much influenced by American literature. He never actually went to the South Seas, and he wrote this poem under the influence of reading Melville. Have you read Melville? Don’t give me that book-burner’s look! Reading is a solitary and perfectly harmless vice. In this poem, Pavese writes of an adolescent’s fascination with a sailor relative who had travelled halfway round the world. When the relative returns, the boy asks him about his travels in the South Seas, but the sailor’s answers are full of disillusionment. For the boy, the South Seas are a paradise; for the sailor, they’re just another landscape marked by the daily routine of work. In my opinion, poets are a disagreeable bunch. They’re like women. They trap you and leave you not knowing where you are. They’re prick-teasers.

  ‘As for the third fragment, it’s difficult to say where it’s from. It’s a perfect hendecasyllabic, and could have been written by any Italian poet since the sixteenth century. But that nostalgia for the south gives it a more modern ring. Maybe it’s by a poet from the Italian south, and maybe he’s referring to Sicily or Naples. Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud. Something tells me I know it. Più nessuno mi porterà nel su
d. In any case, the three fragments suggest a full cycle of disenchantment: the intellectual’s self-image of reading all night and then going south in the winter, so as to cheat coldness and death; then the fear that this mythical south might turn out to be just more routine and disenchantment; and finally, total disillusionment … No more will anyone carry me south.’

  ‘But he put together these three fragments when he’d decided to go south. When he even had the tickets bought, and the hotels booked.’

  ‘Which south, though? Maybe he discovered that although he was in the south, he would never actually reach the south. As García Lorca once wrote: “Although I know the road, I shall never reach Córdoba.” Do you understand? Poets like to play tricks on us, and on themselves. Did you hear that, Enric? The little pansy knows the road, but doesn’t go to Córdoba. Poets really are the dregs. Like his compatriot, Alberti, who says he’ll never go to Granada. He took it into his head to punish the city. I myself have a different conception of poetry: it should be didactic and historical. Do you know my scenic poem on El Cid’s campaign through the kingdom of Valencia? Enric and I will act you a little extract from it, when we’ve drunk a few more bottles and Enric is willing to play the fool. Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud. I’m going to go and read the spine of every poetry book on those shelves, and then I’m sure it’ll come to me.’

  He climbed up a little library ladder and began to look down the shelves. Every now and then he took a book down, leafed through it, and occasionally exclaimed in surprise: ‘I didn’t even know I had this book!’ Fuster, meanwhile, was listening mournfully to a record of Gregorian chant that he had put on for his own pleasure. ‘Getting warm! Warmer!’ Sergio Beser was now actually perched on a bookshelf, looking for all the world like a pirate in a boarding party. ‘Can’t you two smell the South Seas? I can hear the surf.’ He pulled out a slim, tattered volume. First he flicked through it, barely pausing to read. Then he swooped on one of the pages.

  ‘I’ve got it! Here it is!’

  Fuster and Carvalho jumped to their feet, excited at the prospect of a revelation now so close to hand. All the warmth of the food and alcohol rose with them, and through clouds of emotion, they saw Sergio standing at the masthead, with the missal between his hands. He had the solemn face of someone about to unveil a dramatic denouement.

  ‘Lamento per il sud, by Salvatore Quasimodo. La luna rossa, il vento, il tuo cuore di donna del Nord, la distesa di nave … It’s like Vendrell’s L’Emigrant or Juanito Valderrama’s El Emigrante, but with a Nobel Prize attached. Here it is: Ma l’uomo grida la sorte d’una patria. Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud.’

  With an audible cracking of much-abused knee-joints, he jumped down from the bookcase and handed the little book to Carvalho. La vita non è sogno, by Salvatore Quasimodo. ‘Life is not a dream.’ Carvalho read the poem. The lament of a southerner who realizes that he is powerless to return south. His heart has remained in the green fields and overcast waters of Lombardy.

  ‘It’s almost a social poem. Very little ambiguity. Not very polysemic, as Tel Quel would say. This collection was published shortly after the war, at the height of critical neo-realism. Just think: “The south is tired of carting round corpses … tired of loneliness, of chains … tired of the blasphemies of those whose shouts of death have echoed in its wells, who have drunk the blood from its heart.” There is also an amorous counterpoint to the poem: in revealing his sadness as an uprooted southerner, he is speaking to the woman he loves … Is all this of any use to you?’

  Carvalho re-read Stuart Pedrell’s sheet of paper.

  ‘Just literature, in other words.’

  A drop of contemptuous spittle flicked from his lip.

  ‘Yes, I would say so. Just literature. It’s amazing the obsession that people have about the south. Maybe it meant something before the days of tour operators and charter flights, but now the south no longer exists. The Americans have built a literary mythology out of nothing, and the south owes its very existence to them. The word “south” has a primal meaning for every North American. It’s their accursed place, their vanquished territory in a land of conquerors; the only defunct white civilization in the United States—the Deep South. Everything else follows from that … Do you really not know our Valencian theatre cycle? In a moment, Enric and I will perform it for you. You’ll see the difference between a literature of posed sentiment and a genuine popular literature. I’ll be El Cid, and you, Enric, the King of the Moors.’

  ‘You always take the best parts.’

  ‘Not another word! I shall now set the scene. Here is El Cid—although some people say that he wasn’t actually the Cid. Anyway, here is the lord of Morella at the city gates, and he sees the approach of the Moorish troops. He goes to the Moor commander and says:

  ‘CID: Who are you that watches me from atop your horse?

  MOOR: I am king of the Moors, come to conquer this town.

  CID: You shall not succeed.

  MOOR: Then we’re going to fuck your women.

  CID: Then there will be war.

  MOOR: Then let there be.

  CID: Trumpeter, blow your horn!’

  Beser and Fuster began singing and jigging around:

  ‘Ox shit

  When it dissolves

  Melts away.

  So does cow shit.

  Donkey shit doesn’t, though.’

  When they finally came to rest in front of Carvalho, he clapped until his hands hurt. The professor and the manager bowed gravely.

  ‘That first piece could be called “The Defence of Morella”. The next one takes place before the gates of Valencia.’

  Fuster went on all fours, and Beser sat on top of him.

  ‘I’m El Cid, riding on his horse Babieca. A Moor, whom you will have to imagine, exclaims:

  ‘MOOR: Why, by heaven, it’s the Cid!

  ANOTHER MOOR: Why, it’s the whore!

  FIRST MOOR: Not the whore, but Ximena.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Beser, dismounting.

  ‘Popular theatre is always short. Do you know David and the Harp?’

  Just as Carvalho was saying no, a hot belch came up from his liver. Beser rolled another cigarette. Fuster was dozing, face down, on the kitchen table.

  ‘You have to imagine the palace of Jerusalem. David is furious with Solomon for reasons we don’t need to go into. But he is clearly furious. Imagine all the Asiatic luxury you can, and whatever kind of harp you like. Have you ever seen a harp?’

  Carvalho drew the form of a harp in the air. Beser examined it with a critical eye.

  ‘More or less. Anyway, David is furious with Solomon for reasons we don’t need to go into. Solomon says: “David, play the harp.” David looks at him, and frowns. He takes the harp and throws it in the river. That’s all. What do you think of it?’

  Carvalho stood up to applaud. Beser gave the half-smile of a victorious toreador feigning modesty. Fuster lifted himself off the table and tried to clap, but had difficulty making his hands meet.

  Then the little light remaining in Carvalho’s head went out. He felt himself being dragged into a car, and amid false images and memories, he found himself heaped with Enric Fuster in the rear seat of a car that was neither his nor Fuster’s. The professor’s ruddy face extended into the glowing tip of a lighted cigarette which helped him to see the road down which the car was travelling in an attempt to prove that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

  He pictured his liver as some kind of animal half consumed by sulphuric acid. A purée of shit and blood. His head and legs felt slow and heavy, and he had a Saharan thirst. Water. The thirst swelled from his mouth and took over his chest. As he groped for the refrigerator in the dark, he patted his liver in an attempt to gain its indulgence and calm its fury. Never again. Never again. Why did he do these things? One drinks in the hope or expectation of that click that will open ever-closed doors. He picked up the bottle of ice-cold mineral water and filled his mout
h, letting the liquid dribble down his pyjama front. Then he looked for a particular crystal-cut glass which he used only for bottles of champagne costing over five hundred pesetas. He filled it with the same cold water that had just served him as a shower. This, he decided, would be his early morning champagne.

  ‘You’re like a pensioned-off duke. With haemorrhoids. This very morning you’ll be trying to get a passage to the South Seas. Waiter, please commission my fellow countryman, the Valenciano, to make me an ice-swan filled with fresh lychees … What the hell is a Valencian waiter doing in this story?!’

  He had read it somewhere. Or maybe he would make a sailing boat for his shipwrecked companions. Read until late in the night, and then all go south in the winter. Do you all really have any idea where the south is? But when I tell him that he is among the lucky ones who have seen day break over the most beautiful islands on earth, he smiles at the memory and replies that when the sun rose, the day was already old for them.

  ‘The south is the other face of the moon.’

  As he said, or rather shouted, the word ‘moon’, he felt grateful for the water’s coolness as it assuaged the heat of the alcohol and the self-disgust inside him. The other face of the moon. A shower—first hot, then cold—refreshed the skin round his brain. Six in the morning. Day was trying to break through. Trees were already imposing their shape on the horizon.

  ‘The other face of the moon.’

  He was telling himself something. He caught himself looking for a street map of the city, that he kept for his more sordid investigations. The wife entered the furnished flat on Avenida de Hospital Militar at 4.30 pm. A surprising time, since adulterous women generally prefer to enter furnished flats after dark. A bit silly for you to ask me whether she was with anyone. The tatty street map lay open before him, like the tired skin of some overworked beast of burden, falling apart at the seams. He put his finger on the area where Stuart Pedrell’s body had been found. His eye travelled across to the other end of town, to San Magín. A man is stabbed to death, and his killers have an idea. Decontextualize him. He’s to be taken right across town, but to a human and urban setting where his death would still make sense.