‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You zimmer iss on der firs flor; if you vont dere iss a liff to go upp.’
I stared at Michael and Michael stared back at me, then we both stared at the German woman with our mouths open. Just how bloody decrepit did she think we were? Michael glowered at the woman and stumped up the stairs. I glowered at her in turn but decided to take the lift; that would teach her. There was a mirror in the lift. Michael was right – I looked like an old, gay ice-cream salesman.
That night we were to dine as guests of the Conil Tourist Board, with Pepa and Mari-Carmen, who were its head honchos. We were the only jurors in town; the others would turn up on the day of the event itself, not having the long journey that the doctor and I had undertaken. We met the women at the hotel bar and kissed one another chastely on the cheek, and then, because I thought it was amusing and might break what little ice was there to break, I went into the ice-cream salesman routine and told our hostesses what Michael had said about my beautiful jacket. They averred, both of them, that it was a very fine jacket, if not perhaps the very apex of current fashion. These were young women and they knew what they were talking about in the fashion department; I felt vindicated.
We crammed into Pepa’s tiny car, the doctor and I in the back, grasshopper-like, with our knees up by our ears, and headed out of town in order that nobody could get at us, and, by means of skulduggery, influence the result of the competition. The important thing, obviously, was to keep us out of the clutches of Cuqui and thus avoid any possible accusation of malfeasance. We were to eat at a restaurant that, for reasons of its own, had decided not to enter the running. I suggested to our hostesses, in what I thought was a humorous way, that perhaps this might be because it was not up to the mark on the gastronomy front.
‘Judge for yourself,’ said Mari-Carmen a little tartly.
Everybody made a great fuss of us as we were introduced to the owner, the chef and the waiters. The place was just the way I like my fish restaurants to be: on the beach so you could wiggle your toes appreciatively in the sand, and with a nice blue nautical theme – nets and knots and old anchors, lobster pots and other bits of fishing gear propped up here and there. I could see that the doctor thought it a little corny, but I felt it was perfect. And the fish…
‘Would a selection of tuna dishes chosen by myself be acceptable?’ asked the owner unctuously. I think he thought that Michael and I were more serious gastrónomos than we actually are. We all found this suggestion most amenable and sat down amidst a flurry of fussing and mussing from the waiters. Now, when I say tuna you may be thinking of that dry cardboard-like tuna that comes in tins; actually fresh tuna, and certainly the sort of fresh tuna that was doing the rounds in Conil at almadraba time, is something quite different. A tuna is a big fish: it can weigh up to half a ton, and there are many different cuts, and many of those cuts are the most tender, succulent, toothsome morsels you could ever imagine.
White wine from a vineyard down the coast was brought and poured ice cold into great balloons of crystal, and after they had given suitable time to Michael and my jokes and banter, Mari-Carmen and Pepa launched into the almadraba spiel. Conil, they told us, and its neighbour, Barbate, down the coast, had been fishing tuna since way before the Romans. Maybe even in the time of the Phoenicians. The Romans made ‘garum’ from the fermented guts of the fish, and this, a concoction very much like ‘Gentleman’s Relish’, was exported all over the Mediterranean. The general lack of enthusiasm in the modern world for a sauce made from fermented fish guts has brought the garum trade to an end, but the tuna fishing continues and arouses high passions.
Most tuna, these days, is swept up by an industrial fleet that ravishes the oceans in search of ever greater profit, heedless of any consequence. The almadraba, although unlikely to arouse the enthusiasm of the tuna themselves – for fish slaughtering by any means is a pretty unedifying business – takes a small toll of the fish stocks, using manpower from the coastal towns and a cunningly contrived system of nets to entrap a portion of the spring and autumn migrations of tuna. There are quotas, too, and it would seem that the draconian imposition of these over recent years is resulting in a slight revival of stocks. This year’s quota, so we were told, was filled in record time.
My aquarium-builder friend Simon, who knows about tuna, having set up an education project at Palma de Mallorca, insists that we should not eat any tuna at all – not skipjack, nor yellowfin, nor bluefin, nor red – if we want our grandchildren to enjoy these fish in the seas and on the table. The species is that close to extinction. He does concede, though, that you may be able to justify eating an appetiser or two of tuna caught by sustainable means of fishing, like the almadraba. With this bit of sophistry I was able to ease my conscience enough to tuck in to the dainty morsels brought that night for our delectation.
Simon it was, too, who told me that we shouldn’t eat octopus. It wasn’t that they are in danger of extinction, but the fact that they are so advanced along the evolutionary scale that they love beauty. Apparently they create gardens at the mouths of their caves on the sea floor, amusing themselves by making pleasing arrangements of shells, fishbones and bottletops and suchlike. ‘How can you eat a creature that loves beauty?’ he would admonish me.
For years, accordingly, I denied myself the pleasure of eating octopus, and whenever I found myself in a pulpería – which was not that often, as the reason for visiting a pulpería, as the name would imply (pulpo means ‘octopus’), is to eat octopus – I would upbraid the owner on the ills of his trade. My stance did not win me friends in that part of the community. And then one day I was passionately holding forth upon the beastliness of eating octopus, when my interlocutor stopped me with an incredulous look, saying, ‘Octopus! But they are the hijos de putas – the sons of bitches – who eat the baby turtles!’
I told all this to Pepa and Mari-Carmen, who were not much impressed; they clearly wanted to tell us more about their tuna. About ten years before, with the tuna catch dwindling and the fortunes of the town ailing, somebody came up with the idea of setting up a tuna-cooking competition among the local restaurants. It coincided with the spring tuna harvest, and used the first fat and succulent tuna of the year. The concurso was a tremendous success in fettling up the cookery on offer and encouraging gastronomical tourism. From small beginnings it had now grown so that no fewer than thirty-three restaurants took part.
Thirty-three restaurants. I did a swift calculation as I embarked eagerly upon the evening’s fourth exquisite dish of tuna. Thirty-three entrants would mean at least thirty-three different dishes to taste and judge. I looked darkly at the Doctor, whose eyes were shut, his face suffused with gastronomic ecstasy.
‘Michael, do you know what this means?’
‘Do I know what what means?’ he mumbled absently.
‘There are no fewer than thirty-three entrants in this concurso.’
‘So? I f-fail to see what you’re driving at.’
‘Well, according to my calculations that means that we are going to eat thirty-three different tuna dishes …’
‘Of course. It’s actually forty. I will be judging seventeen dishes, and you and your jury twenty-three.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ I spluttered. ‘You can’t keep your critical faculties working for twenty-three different dishes.’
‘It’ll be pan comido,’ said the Doctor, infuriatingly. ‘I once had to judge a cherry brandy competition in Castillo de Locubín. I had to taste fifty brandies … and the best of them was truly disgusting. At the end of it I was catatonic.’
This information did little to allay my concern.
‘You don’t have to eat the whole dish, you know,’ he continued. ‘Just a morsel here, a morsel there … In Castillo de Locubín I didn’t drink fifty whole glasses of cherry brandy. L-lord, no. I just took a sip from each one.’
It was alright for Michael, I reflected; he did this sort of thing all the time; but I wasn’t sure if I
would be able to think and speak critically about twenty-three morsels of tuna dishes. It seemed to me that the odds would be heavily stacked in favour of whoever was fortunate enough to be the first to present their offering. At the beginning of the concurso we jurors would be eager to fall upon the food, and the most mediocre of morsels would hit us where it counts. Later, as our bellies began to fill, the general enthusiasm would wane, until, towards the end, one would die rather than look at another tuna dish. I suppose the professional gastronome is able, through long and diligent practice, to take into account this inherent unfairness.
These, then, were my thoughts as I worked my way through a fifth exquisite preparation of tuna. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to eat tuna the night before the concurso. But this was Conil in almadraba time.
Eventually the wonderful meal was over and Pepa and Mari-Carmen dropped us back in town. It was about one in the morning by now, on a warm night. Turning a corner in the maze of the town, we came across a long table surrounded by late-night revellers.
‘Cuqui!’ cried Michael. ‘Fancy seeing you here …’
And there, by the strangest of coincidences, was Cuqui, holding forth amongst her friends, a glass of wine in her hand. I had not met Cuqui before. We kissed our greetings. A glass of wine appeared, and a tapa of … yes, tuna.
Cuqui was an attractive, powerful woman, the sort you might encounter striding with the wind in her hair at the head of a multitude of triumphant workers, a club-hammer or sickle in hand. She was dressed in chef’s whites, having just come off a shift at her restaurant, La Mejorana. I had been thinking that perhaps the best strategy to deal with the forthcoming ordeal would be to go to bed early with a good book, but this was not the Doctor’s modus operandi, so we settled in for one of those long late-night sessions. And hey, sitting in the street in a pretty little seaside town on a warm night in May with good wine and good company … well, there are worse ways to spend one’s time.
About three rounds into the early hours of the morning the little gathering broke up. Jesús, who was Cuqui’s partner, offered to take us to a couple of bars he knew. The Doctor’s face lit up. ‘Well, alright, Michael, but just one drink in one bar,’ I insisted. So we sat in the square and drank super-strength cuba libres while Jesús and Cuqui debated which clubs we might move on to, to prolong our night’s revelry.
After a little while – I’m not a fan of cuba libres – which in Spain cover everything fizzy with spirits, from gin and tonic to the deeply aberrant whisky and coke – I made my excuses and walked back to the hotel. There I coasted along the shores of sleep, haunted by visions of groaning mounds of tuna, Pepa and Mari-Carmen egging me on to ever more frightful feats of gluttony. Then at last I swam thankfully into the net and drifted lazily into the sweet bower of slumber.
Suddenly the door crashed open, and with a foul oath the Doctor stumbled into the room.
‘YOU AWAKE STILL, CHRIS? You really missed something: we went to the most wonderful bar. I think it was the best bar I have ever been in.’
‘I thought that was in Medina Sidonia,’ I groaned, ‘and I was asleep, as it happens. I was dreaming that I was a tuna swimming into the almadraba net.’
‘Well you b-better get out of there a bit quick; we’ve got a lot of tuna to eat tomorrow. Time to get some sleep.’
He stomped from the room and proceeded to lay waste to the bathroom; the oaths and the thrashing about and the rushing of turbulent waters sounded like nothing so much as an almadraba. Then he hurled himself onto his bed and within thirty seconds was snoring loudly. I inserted my ear-plugs and reflected that you would have to like somebody like Michael an awful lot to go travelling with them.
The gathering round the table in the street had impressed upon me the serious nature of our task. A great deal of hope and investment in effort and time had gone into the concurso and I resolved to play my part. Accordingly, next morning I woke the Doctor early, and after a light breakfast, took him for a long brisk walk along the beach. Other people were walking their dogs, flirting with the idea of going in the water – ‘The Atlantic Ocean in May!’ shuddered Michael – or combing the sand with metal detectors, looking, so they told us, for coins and jewels dropped from people’s pockets. We strode barefoot and with our trouser legs rolled up, like gay ice-cream salesmen, beneath the invisible nylon lines of fishermen fishing from the beach. We peered sympathetically into their empty buckets.
Half a kilometre off the beach were the buoys of the almadraba nets. We wondered that the tuna would swim so far inshore when there was the whole of the strait at their disposal. ‘I expect it’s because of the currents,’ I informed Michael. ‘There’ll be eddies along the shore that they can swim with, whereas they would be pushed to make headway against the massive bodies of water moving through the centre of the straits.’ I stopped for a minute to marvel at this perspicacious piece of deduction.
The sun was getting higher and the heat of the day was starting to make itself felt. ‘We’d better be getting along,’ said Michael, ‘it’s quarter-past eleven and the c-concurso k-kicks off at half-past.’
Half-past eleven seemed cruelly early for a gastronomic concurso. I wasn’t in the least bit hungry. But we scuffed the sand from our feet on the boardwalk, slipped into our shoes and walked up to the Escuela de Hostelería to our fearful task. I felt just the littlest bit sick.
The place was already packed out. There was a patio all decked up for festivity with a lot of umbrellas and chairs brightly emblazoned with a brewery logo; there was a venencero – one of those coves who, dressed in medieval costume, miraculously dispenses sherry from a barrel with a silver cup on the end of a long whippy cane; and there was a free bar. Things were shaping up nicely and the Doctor and I began to feel more positive about the coming ordeal. We glided through the already raucous throng, smiling and nodding benignly – although clearly nobody had the faintest idea who we were – towards the bar.
There we were both grasped firmly from behind. Our captors were Pepa and Mari-Carmen.
‘Oh no, you don’t,’ they said, almost in chorus.
‘D-don’t w-what? …’ stammered the Doctor and I in unison, a little taken aback.
‘You mustn’t mingle with the general public. If we let you in there, who knows what might happen to you? And you mustn’t drink. Jurors drink only water.’
‘W-water!?’ blubbered the Doc, incredulous. ‘We can’t drink water … water drowns the taste buds; it stupefies the palate, distends the belly. It oxidises the critical faculties, dilutes acuity. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.’
But Pepa and Mari-Carmen were having none of it. They steered us to an enclosure separated from the patio and its public by the thinnest of screens, where two big round tables were set with heaps of gleaming cutlery, napkins, and bottles of water. We were the only people in there. We looked at one another in dismay; coming through the thin screen was the sound of corks popping, the jolly clink of glasses and the infinitesimal hiss of the fine golden stream of sherry arcing through the air to land sizzling in the glass as the venencero did his spectacular stuff. All the glorious sounds of wine and fiesta.
‘A nice glass of water, Michael?’ I suggested. ‘Get us in the mood …’
We sipped the clear liquid and took stock of our inner sanctum. We were right next to the kitchen, and through glass panels in the doors we could see a sort of infernal lobster quadrille as the white-clad chefs and the black-clad waiters bobbed and weaved and dipped and hurtled about amongst the jets of steam, raging fires and clashing knives.
Our fellow jurors began to drift in. First was Danny, an enormous, jolly young man with a goatee beard. He was a chef and owned a chain of restaurants on the Cádiz coast. You only had to look at him to realise that he knew his stuff in the cookery department. Next there appeared a couple of the smoothest, snappiest-dressed young men from Sevilla. The Doctor had them down instantly as pijos, or toffs. They were improbably handsome, slim, tanned and exquis
itely groomed, but you couldn’t hold this against them for long because they were disarmingly charming. One of them, Nicolás, was president of the Ibero-American Gastronomic Society, or some such thing, and between them, as a sort of hobby, they ran a charity for street kids in Cuba. I started to feel a little relieved that I was not to be president of this august gathering.
To make us up to the two sets of four jurors, there was a bouncy sort of a food journalist and a couple of other blokes who said they were food critics, but whose reason for being there was clearly as nebulous as Michael’s and mine. Who is not a food critic, after all? We all bobbed and bowed and introduced ourselves and poured one another libations of water. It has to be said, though, that things were not going down with a bang at this stage. It felt like a convention of abstainers and made you realise just what a help a bit of hooch is on these occasions. To exacerbate the awfulness of this situation, the odd dignitary was ushered in to shake our hands and come up with a platitude or two, and then there were the inevitable photographs of us all grinning at one another over our hateful glasses of water. Beyond the screen, of course, the merrymaking was notching fast up the scale as the beer and wine did their stuff.
And then suddenly the kitchen doors burst asunder and a slinky, black-clad waitress emerged and placed the first dish on the table. Beside it she put a number and the description of the dish, but no indication of which chef or which restaurant. At the same time an identical dish was taken out for the delectation of the public; they couldn’t eat it – just look at it. They had the benefit of the name of the restaurant, and of course some wine. We could hear a lot of oohing and aahing as the public considered dish #1.
Dish #1 looked pretty good and it was one of ours – cocina tradicional. It was, according to the card, and if my memory serves me well Parpatana de atún rojo al 10rf con couscous de frutos secos y torrija salada. It was served on a particularly pleasing blue platter, clearly handmade by a local potter. A nice touch, I thought. We four jurors of cocina tradicional considered the dish earnestly. Michael and the other jurors of cocina innovadora came over to consider it, too, as their first dish had not arrived and they were hungry and keen as mustard to get going.
Last Days of the Bus Club Page 9
