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  “Me also. I’m tired, very much. You come today?”

  “I can’t today but I’ll be back very soon. I really want to talk with you again and, if Àlex lets us, cook together too. Now, put Àlex on please. I’m going to tell him off a bit, which will give me a lot of pleasure, and I need to start the day with a bit of oomph. You look after yourself, sweetheart.”

  Àlex cusses a bit before taking the phone and stumbling through an apology. “Carol, er, sorry I walked out on you like that last night. I was in a state.”

  “Listen, laddie, you excelled yourself, with me and with Annette. Let me tell you that this little foreign lady you’ve taken on is worth her weight in Sevruga caviar. If you don’t look after her, if you bully her just for the pleasure of feeling superior, if you keep making everyone around you feel like shit and if you apply any single one of your strategies of psychological sadism, I’m going to saw your balls off, nice and slowly with a rusty knife, purée them with barbed beaters, make patties of them and fry them in hot oil. You choose. By the way, when is that lovely girl’s day off? I want to invite her out to dinner. She needs to discover there’s a bit more to life than hanging around your run-down hole.”

  Carol’s going for the jugular today. The most intelligent strategy is not to fight back too much, Àlex thinks. He says, “She has the same day off as I do, when the restaurant’s closed, which is on Mondays. I’m free too and can come and have dinner with you. It’ll be good for me to have a bit of a break.”

  “No way! I’m going to punish you for quite a while. Let’s see if you can learn not to leave me stranded with my mouth gaping open, not because I’m in the grip of some kind of culinary rapture, but because you storm out in the middle of a conversation. Anyway, I must say that I was overjoyed, absolutely overjoyed that you pissed off like that, because I had the chance to get to know the girl and do something I’ve always wanted to do, which is cooking Lord-knows-what, in a top-ranking restaurant – well let’s say in a whatever-ranking restaurant, as it is nowadays.”

  “Carol, I know this may sound trite, but I’m determined to get Antic Món back to the top. I’m in especially good spirits today. I found a box of the freshest fish imaginable at the door. It’s a gift and also a sign that not all is lost. I imagine Frank’s involved in this, but the thing is, I’m cooking with top-quality fish again, even if they’re small fish that wouldn’t bring in much on the market. If I bone them and cosset them a bit, you’ll get the finest Mediterranean fish right here at my place.”

  “It’s not a matter of fish, or raw material, or quality, Àlex, as you very well know. It’s about good manners, understanding the customer, making an effort, being nice to people, teaching tactfully, being an elegant host and knowing how to explain your dishes. You fail on every count. You do what you like, but let me repeat, it’s not enough to be an excellent chef. You have to listen to your customers. I have to leave you now. I’m going to throw up, because I drank almost a whole bottle of Lepanto on a virtually empty stomach last night. Let me remind you that your chicken was all but inedible. Give that lovely girl from Quebec a kiss from me. She has the hands of an angel, a heart of gold and the brains of a Nobel laureate.”

  “I hope the sour bloody cow drowns in her own vomit,” Àlex mutters to himself as he returns to the kitchen. “And that she doesn’t bloody try to get off with Annette.” He promises himself that he’ll slam the door in her face next time she comes to Antic Món.

  He’s well and truly convinced that, thanks to him and him alone, without the toxic advice of any critic or any other arse-licker for that matter, his restaurant will soon shine again.

  4

  SWEET

  If God had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn’t have given us grandmothers.

  LINDA HENLEY

  It’s a month today since Annette arrived in Antic Món. Àlex hasn’t mentioned a salary or payment of any kind, but she’s not bothered by this. She’s happy. She knows it’s a question of patience – the patience of those who have no choice.

  The Friends of Antic Món Facebook page has almost five hundred followers and people sometimes turn up at the restaurant wanting to take up one of the offers or try their luck at the guessing games Annette posts on the page.

  Things seem to be looking up. The restaurant hasn’t been empty for more than two weeks. Occasionally they even have more than one table. It’s nothing to get too excited about, but at least they’re not standing around twiddling their thumbs, although it must be said that, whatever the case, Àlex never stands around twiddling his thumbs. He’s always on the go, constantly busy in the kitchen. When there is no more cooking to be done, he goes off to his office to do the books. This is a cross he has to bear. He’s always moaning about it, saying it’s difficult, a pain in the arse, and that doing an accountant’s work is a waste of his talent. But the way things are going, doing the books is actually quite easy: very little income and expenses galore. Although since he can’t pay most of his suppliers, even the expenses side is skimpy. He doesn’t have to worry about a payroll: just the two of them are working in the restaurant and Annette doesn’t have a contract. Neither has she been paid for the month she’s been working there.

  A couple of days ago Àlex asked her to give him a hand with the books. He must have wanted to pass on the crappy job to her, or why else would he be making her go up to his office, she now wonders, as she’s following him upstairs up to the tiny room where he keeps his paltry takings. Once installed, Àlex pours himself a glass from the first bottle he finds to confront his trials with a little more verve.

  When she first arrived, Annette thought gin was his favourite tipple, but she’s since discovered that his taste varies depending on what’s within reach. Anything’s good as long as it has high alcohol content. He’s funny when he decides to justify what he’s drinking, always downing it with the same words: “I love this. It’s the best drink in the world, my favourite of all.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s gin, vodka, cognac, whisky, wine, cava or Bonet herbal liqueur. Àlex believes you can’t lock yourself in an office without having a nice glass of something strong.

  “What are you going to do tomorrow, Annette?” he suddenly asks.

  She takes a moment to answer. She wavers, surprised by such a personal question.

  “I do nothing. Rest. I always rest the Monday. I need. You, what you do? Where you go the Monday?”

  “Doing what I have to do… getting away from it all. You should do that too, get out a bit, see Catalonia, move around and meet people. What about Òscar? Don’t you see him? You’re friends, aren’t you?”

  Àlex wants to find out a bit more about Annette, but doesn’t seem keen to tell his own secrets. She, however, has no hang-ups.

  “With Òscar, we the virtual friends. Just meet one time. We chat very much with computer. I very tired for to see more persons. Maybe later.”

  “Two loners, we are,” he says, trying to imitate Bogart. “Two sociable loners. That sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. We need to be alone and we need to share. Why did you leave Quebec?”

  “Quebec cold place… I want see Barcelona.”

  “You’re a dab hand at changing the subject, girl! Good work. Well, no one gives a damn about what you did or what you’re doing. It’s a bit like old photos. They’re fascinating because they’re mute, and then you can imagine their stories. Stay as you are, carrot top. The mystery you’re cloaked in makes you even more alluring.”

  With a skinful of highly alcoholic Basque sloe berries in liquid form, poured from his bottle of patxaran, Àlex is getting a little maudlin.

  Annette pours herself a glass and adds some ice. She likes this liqueur, which she considers “indigenous”, traditional and authentic.

  “When I will go Barcelona, you also come?”

  “I don’t like the city. If you want, we’ll go to the Maresme and look at the sea one day. One Monday night.”

  “And we no can go Monday in day?�
� Annette asks, trying to find out what he does on his days off.

  “Maresme is cold place…” he mocks.

  Strange as it may seem, Annette hasn’t left the restaurant in all this time. Apart from the supermarket, she’s seen hardly anything of its surroundings and, of course, has never been to Barcelona. It doesn’t bother her, because she’s not here to go sightseeing and right now she’s giving her all to the project of reviving the restaurant.

  On Mondays, Àlex heads off wherever he goes and she enjoys some peace and quiet in her small room. She spends the day resting and working on the Friends of Antic Món Facebook page. Àlex hasn’t found out about it yet. He thinks social networks are teenage crap. However, thanks to this crap, quite a few tables have been filled with people wanting to taste “the fabulous cuisine of Àlex Graupera”.

  “Want to see a film with me tonight, girl?”

  Àlex doesn’t want to sound tender, so he always addresses her as “girl” when he comes out with anything she might interpret as a come-on. Annette understands this as a distancing manoeuvre, a way of putting years between them, as if he’s much older and sees her as a little girl who could never aspire to be a friend, let alone a lover.

  “Oh yes! What film?”

  “One of my favourites. I’ve seen it at least ten times: Big Night.”

  “In what cinema?”

  There is no cinema in Bigues i Riells, which means they’ll have to go to Granollers or even to Barcelona, Annette thinks. But nothing is further from Àlex’s intentions.

  “In my room.”

  Annette finally opens her eyes at about eleven in the morning. She’s slept for hours, but badly. She drank too much last night. Both of them drank too much. The film, Big Night, was great. She loved it, and she loved relaxing with Àlex just as much. Lying in bed, she recalls details of the film and her evening with the boss.

  She was surprised by his room. She imagined it would be baroque, full of mementos, but instead she found an austere space with badly distributed old furniture, dominated by a huge television set and an even more impressive stereo system. Not a picture on the walls. The only personal touch was a set of shelves full of old LPs, CDs, DVDs and videotapes, all set out in perfect order.

  They sat on the bed because there was no sofa. Annette was both relaxed and edgy, however contradictory this may seem. She was relaxed because he was relaxed, and edgy because she was expecting some sign from Àlex that might be interpreted as an overture.

  But no. And it was better like this. They didn’t talk much, but laughed a lot. She was surprised that Àlex knew how to laugh. This was something she’d never seen.

  When the film finished and she was leaving, he said. “I’ve got lots of films and I enjoy watching them over and over again. We can do this again, if you like.”

  These words were even more comforting than sitting by the fire with a cup of tea on a cold winter’s afternoon in her beloved Quebec, watching snowflakes gently drifting down outside the cold-misted windows.

  Annette goes down to the kitchen, hoping to find her boss there and relive the story of the film about two Italian brothers who open a restaurant in the United States with exquisite food and not a single customer who understands it. A customerless restaurant with exceptional food, just like Antic Món.

  He’s not there. She’s completely alone in the restaurant and this is disconcerting. She wants to talk about their nice time last night. They were getting on well, starting to feel closer. She’s surprised that she wants to see him and spend more time with him when on previous Mondays she’d enjoyed precisely the opposite, which is Àlex’s absence and the fact that he leaves early in the morning.

  She’s got a headache. She cuts a huge slice of bread, covers it with thin rounds of cucumber, some roast chicken, apple, mayonnaise and a sprinkling of oregano.

  Then she goes upstairs. Turns on the computer. A whole world is waiting for her out there beyond the screen: the blogs she likes, the friends she wants to read in English and French. It’s such a relief to forget about Catalan for a while! She opens Facebook and posts some photos of Antic Món on the restaurant’s page. They’re very enticing: pictures of forks in a row, a box of bright-red strawberries, the brilliant colours of a salad, the dust that’s collected on a venerable bottle of cognac, a golden roast just out of the oven… She’s so engrossed that she almost misses Carol, who’s chiding her from the chat window.

  “What are you doing today, love?”

  “Hallo Carol. I do nothing. I rest.”

  “I want to see you. Let’s go and have lunch somewhere.”

  “I eat now a sandwich.”

  “Leave your sandwich. I’m coming to get you. I’m going to take you to a fabulous restaurant, legendary. It’s in Granollers. We’ll eat proper Catalan food there. I’ll be with you in a couple of hours. Get yourself dolled up. It’s an important day today…”

  Annette doesn’t know how to say no. She doesn’t want to go, but can’t think of a remotely convincing excuse. She doesn’t understand why it’s an important day, but she’s always been obedient.

  She gets dressed, runs a comb through her hair and clumsily applies some eyeliner. She still has more than an hour before Carol comes to get her. She whiles away the time surfing the web and can’t resist typing “Atlantic Viandes” in the Google search box.

  She’s already seen plenty of pages where the name of the company is prominent in the news. Suddenly she finds a new one. Oh no! What’s this? More problems? Now very alert, she reads the note. It seems that a new gang of criminals has been caught fattening pigs with anabolic steroids. A few lines into the article she reads:

  This is the first food safety scandal in Canada since the ATLANTIC VIANDES clenbuterol poisoning tragedy. The Canadian police have not yet arrested the director of the latter company.

  Annette starts dry-retching, trying to vomit, but she can’t. She undresses and gets in the shower, as if to wash away the memories. She needs to dissolve her tears, burn away her rage in scalding water.

  She loses all sense of time. She has no idea of how long she’s been under the shower. The skin on her fingers is as wrinkled as it used to get when she was a little girl splashing around in her parents’ swimming pool.

  The doorbell rings insistently, three times, but she ignores it. She’s lost in thought.

  Then she reacts. The doorbell! Carol’s here! There’s no time to dress. She wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs to open the door.

  Carol smiles ecstatically. She couldn’t ask for more. Annette, barefoot and wearing only a towel is a heavenly sight.

  “Well, well, well! I never imagined you’d welcome me in such a sexy way.”

  “Sorry, Carol, I shower late.”

  “I’m charmed, love. Let’s go upstairs while you get dressed, OK?

  “No, no… I come down soon as possible. You drink aperitif.”

  “I’m coming with you… Then we can keep talking. I’m sure you have lots to tell me.”

  “Carol, I like for you wait here. Just one minute.”

  Annette’s embarrassed about Carol seeing her humble, poky little room, but Carol is not to be dissuaded, so they go upstairs, each armed with glass of cava.

  Carol is entranced by the photos hanging from rusty nails driven into the wall, thrilled to be able to snoop and check out Annette’s mementos. She asks where she got the rain stick and the mate gourd and runs her finger along the spines of her books on the shelf. She asks about her travels and Annette happily offers her a string of anecdotes. Reliving the moment of buying the rain stick on a trip to Mexico, or the hilarious moment when she was presented with the Quechuan mate gourd helps her forget the anxiety caused by the news she read on the Internet. Annette’s quite comfortable wandering around dressed in a towel and pleased to share her pressed-flower album, a collection of memories in which each petal is a little scrap of her life.

  “I love hearing your stories,” Carol says happily. “But you’d better
get dressed now. It’s after two, and they’ll close the kitchen in La Fonda if we don’t hurry up and get ourselves to Granollers.”

  Carol opens the wardrobe to look for something worthy of the occasion, some sexy dress, but she can’t find one.

  “You’ve only got jeans, white T-shirts and jumpers for climbing mountains. Where on earth did you imagine you were going to live? Livingstone’s jungle? Did you think we’re still cave dwellers rubbing stones together to make fire? Haven’t you got anything stylish?”

  “I work no stop all the day. I no need the luxury dress.”

  “In between luxury and woolly caps there’s a world of possibilities. There are some very good shops in Granollers. I’m going to buy you a dress this afternoon so you can wear it when you come out with me.”

  “Thank you, Carol, but I no need nothing.”

  “Listen, sweetheart, if I want to buy you a dress, I’m going to buy it. Now you just be a good girl.”

  Annette doesn’t know what to make of these last words. She doesn’t get a lot of the nuances in Catalan, but something tells her it’s better to keep quiet.

  She drops the towel on the floor and bends over to put her knickers on. When she’s doing up her bra she finds warm hands helping her.

  She thinks Carol’s being very attentive.

  “Remind me to get you some underwear too. What you’re wearing is fine for going to war, but I like ladies in lovely lacy lingerie. You’ll be gorgeous in garnet red.”

  Annette still doesn’t catch on, but she wants to get dressed quickly and leave. She’s hungry and is keen to see Granollers and the legendary Fonda Europa. And something strange is thickening the air in the room.

  In the car, almost yelling, they sing Nat King Cole’s Spanish songs: “Luna que se quiebra sobre las tinieblas de mi soledad, adooooonde vas…”

  They giggle.

  When they arrive at Fonda Europa, Annette’s astounded to see so many people. The place is bursting at the seams, with tables of customers tucking into large casseroles of rice, massive fillets and immense salads. They have to sit at the bar as there is no free table. A couple of glasses of cava help to while away the time.