After a few minutes a man I recognise – a tinker – sits down beside me. He is carrying a small sack of chickpea flour and is keen to discuss last night’s famous football match. He does not seem to mind that I do not care for sport, and seems happy to lead the conversation in between mouthfuls of flour.
Until the explosion. From nowhere – my brother Johnny.
It is rarely necessary to tell anyone here how I came to be in Cadiz; no one is ever that concerned where the man frying the hake comes from, only that their meal is superior to any other meal on their trip (our few customers are tourists), but the silly, dull, compromised story of my journey here has a lot to do with Johnny.
Too long ago to be specific, around the time I was beginning my studies in architecture in Glasgow, Johnny was in the habit of sending me postcards from Munich and Istanbul and then Munich again – a regular circuit. One card suggested I pick a European city where Johnny could join me and treat us both to a weekend of beer-drinking and hell-raising. It didn’t take me long to decide on Paris – I had it all planned. I intended to visit the hammam at the mosque where I would meet a man, attempt to make love with a man and attempt to explain this to my brother who would make very little of it before communicating it casually to our parents who would extend me their best wishes before wiring me the money for the deposit on an apartment.
I don’t like to tell people what actually happened – jail, where Johnny ended up with a bang – and the effect it had on our parents, who acted as if they were the ones caught with heroin somewhere outside Dubrovnik and were themselves sentenced to seven years in a German prison, in as much they both entered an indistinct funk from which they have not returned.
I start to take Johnny in. His tabby hair is fading to a military-looking grey that is accentuated by a brisk and appealing buzz cut. He’s wearing ripstop combat shorts and his feet are spreading all over a pair of translucent pink pool shoes so that it looks like he has just come from a nightclub or the beach.
‘Where’s my big John the Baptist welcome?’ he says. ‘Aren’t you supposed to kill something to celebrate my return?’
‘You’re getting your parables all mixed up,’ I say. ‘Give me till lunchtime and I can organise a beheading.’
‘We’ll skip lunch if you don’t mind. Is that tuna cock for sale over there?’ he says, helping himself to a doughnut. ‘I think someone tried to sell me a fried eye.’
‘No they didn’t.’
‘I had better food in Ulan Bator.’
‘Not to mention prison,’ I say.
A gust from the building site covers Johnny’s doughnut. He hands the dusty parcel to the tinker who has been enjoying our reunion, shoulders his rucksack and flops into the market, beckoning me to follow him. I am not expecting anything unique or memorable to come from today (not from Johnny).
‘Little bit rough for you here, no?’ he says. ‘Or is this the kind of place where you pay people to piss on you and beat you up?’
He hops from stall to stall helping himself to fruit as I give not-with-me smiles to the stallholders that I know. It doesn’t occur to me, as Johnny is filling his pockets with apricots, that I haven’t seen him in fifteen years and that my hell-for-leather flight from home was made from blame for myself but first blame for my unlucky, dumb big brother. It has occurred to me many times that the reason I am not an architect but a chef – albeit not The Man with the Plastic Fork in the Emperor Inn in Castlebar – is down to not going to Paris.
I was in Hong Kong in a relationship with a beautiful boy so I didn’t encourage contact upon Johnny’s release. I was cheffing in hotels bigger than hospitals, in a casino built into a canyon. When I heard that he was living in a bus in the countryside in Portugal I didn’t care, though one night, with most of a bottle of Ketel One inside me, I contacted him there. I was going to book him a ticket the second I got off the phone, call one of my contacts at the Shangri-La and get him a rate. I intended to lose the boy for the weekend and the brothers would drink beer and raise hell. When it came down to it we were brothers and we could rely on each other.
But I didn’t book the flight or call the contact at the hotel (the beautiful boy took his own sweet time to disappear) and have had no further contact with Johnny until now.
We escape the market, walk along Calle S— and bump straight into Nacho, who has seen us before we have a chance to evade him. He pulls me right inside Puntillitas with the skill of a kidnapper. I prefer somewhere that allows light but this is Nacho’s idea of a perfectly mysterious little shithole: a hot, concrete-floored cavern with cancer-ward lighting, rancid hams, ashtrays like salad bowls, toothless whores applying ointment underneath disturbing and camp holy pictures, a sweating fridge full of rusty tins of Russian salad to be consumed straight from a ladle. There is a large Superbad poster behind the bar.
Johnny won’t allow me to talk my way out of there and seems drunk before the first glass of moscatel is drained. It is nearly ten and, naturally concerned about Oscar’s, I depart making sure he has money for drink. (He has lots.)
I close the restaurant’s preposterous church doors, a huge edifice concealing a good acre of spindly greenhouses sagging with misuse, not to mention the womb-like dining room only a failed architect could bear. In the spooky courtyard I drink coffee under a photograph of a phantom façade and decide that the problem – today – with Oscar’s is its owner’s infuriating comfort in its failings.
I want to make a proposal to Oscar. I put this in a letter. I consider the opening carefully. ‘It’s time to plan for the future and plan carefully.’ No. ‘Please give me the opportunity to be part of the future.’ This is a better start. I describe the kind of dishes I would like to see on the menu: game sushi, four types of heirloom beetroot, ambitious desserts like molasses and Tic Tac soufflés. I take time over the letter because I want Oscar to be my friend and perhaps my lover once this is over.
Oscar came to Europe from Argentina in the 1960s to take photographs of wars. Not finding war in the south of Spain he specialised in buildings and people in disrepair. Dead birds in muddy puddles. He also photographed weddings.
A few years ago, whilst unhanging a brave but unloved exhibition of photographs of decaying geraniums, Oscar had a conversation with his then wife from which I suspect he has not recovered. He opened the restaurant shortly afterwards – a place that takes Spanish classics and improves upon them, and though it has been open for less than two years, it has been shaped by a way of life that he has formed over forty years. He is a slippery man. He acts like we are friends though it is certain we aren’t. I have scarcely any relationship with him, except that he is my boss and a man who, because of his moods, is forever preoccupied, as though he is totting up a sum having realised a previous error that is now impossible to correct.
I make no mention of what happened in his life. This is because I am unable to consider properly what happened with his wife; if they were happy just beforehand or caught up in something that is now foggy but was important at the time. Oscar, apparently, could not accept that he was not a war photographer, though he has admitted to closing his shutters on anything as dangerous as a New Year’s Eve firework. The conversation concerned his refusal to pay attention to his (failing) marriage, his too-huge-to-contemplate dreams gainsaid by an empty gallery, the photographs bubble-wrapped and leaning against a wall, and Oscar standing, baffled, before them. This is not something he has told me himself (I heard it from a regular customer), since we are not in the habit of discussing anything intimate. It is also possible this is not something we will ever discuss, as I gather from another customer that the restaurant has been discreetly put up for sale. My letter should change that. I envelope it and head for the kitchen with my coffee.
He arrives around noon, carrying a pile of courgette flowers that he won’t discuss when I suggest we stuff them with air-dried chicken skin. He stands by my prep station and grumbles, his particular linen chef’s whites already crumpled up like tissue
paper. I sense that Oscar’s grumbles are enormous and cannot be confronted. Somewhere along the way he has decided that I am not the person to engage in important confidences, conversations that might distinguish a moment like a silvery, orchestral score. Instead we discuss the evening’s menu, divide up the duties and decide, since there are no bookings, that it is all best left for another day. He places the courgette flowers to one side and suggests we might both take some holidays.
My day has been eventful but does not feel like it has begun. I stroll back to Puntillitas, letter written and course almost set. I notice Nacho at the rear of the bar – his silly expression lets me know I am interrupting some fun. A bottle of vodka sits beside possibly thirty empty bottles of beer. Johnny appears to have lost a tooth since I have seen him this morning.
‘What happened to your mouth?’
‘What happened to yours?’ he says.
Johnny looks like someone you would avoid after dark. He rotates his jaw and continues in an urgent tone whilst smuggling something into Nacho’s palm. At the bar a fat man dances with a bucket of boquerones, and my brother, crooked but exaggeratedly clear, calls for silence.
‘I would like to thank you, Nacho, for this auspicious entry into Spanish business life. I intend this to be the best bar in Cadiz. That’s impossible. This is already the best bar in Cadiz. The second-best bar in Cadiz, then. Definitely the best cocaine in Cadiz though.’
Nacho has climbed onto his chair. He looks like he would like a smooch and I try to nuzzle him a little but in fact I am not in the mood. It has become that kind of day. Now Johnny declares that this bar is the reason he is in Cadiz: I don’t think that it is. That he thinks Cadiz is crying out for another Irish bar: I doubt it very much. That he has already made the arrangements: no way. He pours some vodka into a beer glass and lowers it, as if he is commemorating some kind of deal with himself.
‘I suppose you’ve been working on your business plan?’ I say.
‘No need,’ says Johnny. ‘Your boyfriend is my business partner. But you can be my first customer.’
‘And when is this bar opening?’
‘When? Whenever.’
‘It’s opening in here?’
‘Here, yeah. Wherever.’
‘And you’re doing what?’
*
I expect to see Johnny at some point later or in the morning. I don’t. And not a word from Oscar about my proposal. I spend the afternoon at the beach, where I see that a racy-looking bunch of language students have come, in all likelihood, straight from the bars on Paseo M—. I half-expect to see Johnny among them. I can picture him pulling a litre bottle of Cruzcampo from one of the ice bins and helping himself, happy as you like, to a skewer of prawns from the makeshift barbecue. He would fit right in. This would not surprise me; however I do not expect to see Oscar wandering the shoreline, sandals in hand. He takes a slug from a bottle of water and throws the empty into the surf. It’s clear to see that something is going on, that he is in the mood to be left alone, but that is not what I do.
I walk beside him and suppose that a beach is not the most ideal place to be so out of sorts, the tinkling seas a reminder of what is no longer before you, your mind drawn to better times and the certainty that they have all come to an end. But you have to be sad somewhere.
Oscar abruptly throws his sandals into the surf and begins kicking water into the air so that it falls on us as if from an aspergillum. He turns his face to me and I see that he is crying. His tears seem inappropriate in the sunshine, as pointless as a sing-song. For his sake, I wish that he had stayed at home this morning. Of course, I attempt to hold him – only I clumsily clobber my forearm into his chin, breaking some of his tooth. Oscar springs backwards into the waves and, this is something I will never forget, spits some tooth into his hand and laughs like this is the funniest thing since that house fell on Buster Keaton.
‘What are you doing here,’ he says, as we walk back to the restaurant and I wait as Oscar checks that, once again, there are no bookings and the day can carry on with no particular purpose.
*
Nacho can’t stop talking about Johnny’s idea. My brother is Irish and must know a thing or two about bars, after all. However, my thoughts narrow to a single notion that at once widens, until I am back in the kitchen composing my future. I suggest we take a walk to Parque G— and look for a quiet bench to have the conversation that might get complicated but without which we have no chance of progress. Instead, we spend the rest of a long, tedious afternoon on the terrace with only flashes of good humour (due to Nacho’s pouch of sparkling powder) and ending in yet another humid failure to perform in bed for both of us.
And so we visit my brother’s new bar. Johnny welcomes me at the door with a ceremonial sweep of the arm and, instead of the fat man dancing with a bucket and calling out for his saviour, I find a room that has been transformed into something casual and unshowy in a way that I like. Already Johnny is dispensing glad tidings from behind the bar and friendly people I don’t know sit on crates piled three high. Springsteen yahoos happily from the stereo. I take Nacho’s hand and scare him with kisses to which, to my surprise, he responds. It begins with that. There are no quiet corners so we go to the alley where someone has placed the Superbad poster. He unbuttons my shirt and kisses my smooth chest, shaved now to the point of self-abuse; I start to believe that we are experiencing the rebirth of our relationship. I do not doubt the sincerity of his feelings for me. I am in his arms. I touch his face. We return to my postcard apartment and make love on the carpet – beside a solid lump of something like wallpaper paste – with an intensity that is not expressible as love; it is too guiltless for that. It is closer to a refrain of hunger and confusion. Afterwards, I put some fish in the pan – it is that lovely and that simple. There is a little more action before we fall asleep.
Oscar’s has never opened in the daytime – Oscar, for his own reasons, decided that Gaditanos don’t eat lunch – but the next day my boss is there before I am. I remain in the darkened restaurant from where the scantly lit kitchen seems holy or at least surgical. He is manoeuvring carrots and cutting at them in strange stabs so that I know that this will be for a perfectly lethal braised beef-cheek dish: the complex puddle at the bottom of your plate reacting with your mouth so cheerfully that you feel magnanimous and start making plans to keep your own cattle.
He doesn’t acknowledge me but begins pouring sherry onto some vegetables and then adds some other vegetables, including the carrots, to a pan of browning meat. It is important to prepare this dish in two, three, four, five pans, which allows the flavours to develop separately; the complexity comes later, with time. But I am confused. This dish is not on the menu in summertime, though it is one of Oscar’s particular favourites, and I find myself unexpectedly disapproving of his choice, given the daunting heat outside. I should leave him to it, but as I have an urge to make him like me, finally, I approach and begin peeling shallots. He will appreciate this.
‘This will be the last meal I cook for a while,’ says Oscar. ‘So it is a staff meal.’
I toss the onions into a hot pan and peer at them as if they need to be scolded, whilst Oscar decants the reduced sherry into the pan containing the softened vegetables and meat. This is normally conducted in silence; which is how he prefers it. He reaches under the counter, produces a parchment paper lid which he places gently onto the surface of the stew. He looks confused, though it occurs to me that I should be confused. He invites me to smell the pot before he places it in the oven. I lean in and notice something new: his heavy breathing. He nudges me out of the way and opens the door of the oven – the air there seems cooler than the air in the kitchen.
Oscar steps out of his chef’s jacket, adding an old-fashioned soapiness to the evaporating-wine air. There’s something heart-warming about his gymnast’s forearms, his hairless skin almost glittering in the kitchen lighting. He wanders around looking for a clean jacket and I can’t think of what to say and w
hen I come up with something about the apricots my brother stole at the market, Oscar doesn’t acknowledge it, buttoning up a new jacket whilst considering my onions at close quarters. (These will be added to the beef cheeks later.)
‘Please invite your brother to share this meal,’ he says.
More even than the French waiter at La R— on Polk Street, or the tiny but all-seeing monk at the monastery in Wales, or those barnacled brothers on the boat to the Aran Islands, Oscar has a hold over me. It has little to do with sex, the distracted, hapless and sad way I go about making love now – not that I ever sizzled. His expression makes it clear that this is just a casual dinner, don’t assume otherwise, and this is what I expect for the rest of the afternoon.
*
My brother – part-fucked, toothless and happy – walks down Calle S— towards me, hauling a shopping trolley containing a piece of wood the size of a surfboard. He’s babbling into what I think is one of Nacho’s mobile phones and doing his best not to look excited. Some people passing by have an idea that Johnny is a visiting theatrical when in fact he looks like an asshole and Nacho, behind him, I can see now, looks as disreputable as can be. I am not even sure he knows it’s me. I play with the idea of dinner tonight. I consider mentioning it to Johnny, since I am feeling unusually happy and somehow feel responsible for his well-being, since he is nearly paralysed by whatever Nacho has been giving him and would make himself right at home at Oscar’s or anywhere; but now I consider the message this will send to all concerned. Johnny finishes the call and explodes into laughter and a healthy attempt at an Irish jig.
‘Don’t ask me how I do these things,’ he says. ‘Don’t ask me because I won’t tell you. But I did it.’
‘Fucking fuck,’ says Nacho.