by Pablo Tusset
THE BEST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN TO A CROISSANT
Pablo Tusset
Translated from the spanish by KRISTINA CORDERO
First published in Spanish in 2001
by Ediciones Lengua de Trapo
First published in English in 2005
by Canongate Books, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This edition published in 2005
Copyright © 2001, Pablo Tusset
Translation copyright © 2003, Kristina Cordero
The moral right of the author and the translator has been asserted
This digital edition first published by Canongate Books in 2014
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 1841956899
eISBN 9781782114239
www.canongate.tv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
The Brotherhood of Light
Top-Heavy Frontal Load
Venison Liver Paté
Veronica and the Monsters
Quivering Shellfish
The Black Beast
The Monk from Robin Hood
That Superfine Powder
Brother Bermejo
Dentomaxillary Dysfunction
The Incorrupt Arm of St Cecilia
Microscopic Eyelash Specks
Welcome, Mr Consul
Stressed the Fuck Out
Oberon in the Wood
The Porcelain Poodle
The Game Is Up
Epilogue
Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities,
Are Mother Nature’s recipes
That bring the bare necessities of life
—Baloo’s Song
Terry Gilkyson
THE BROTHERHOOD OF LIGHT
The best thing that can happen to a croissant is to get spread with butter: this is what I remember thinking as I split one down the middle and smeared it with discount margarine spread. I also remember how I was about to sink my teeth into it when the telephone rang.
I picked it up, even though I knew I’d have to answer with my mouth full.
‘Yeeeees …’
‘Are you there?’
‘No, I’ve stepped out. Please leave a message after the tone and leave me alone. Beeeeep.’
‘Cut the comedy routine, will you? And what is that you’re chewing on?’
‘I am eating breakfast.’
‘At one o’clock in the afternoon?’
‘I woke up early today. What do you want?’
‘Come by the office. I’ve got news.’
‘Go to hell, I’m not into guessing games.’
‘Well, I’m not into talking on the phone. There’s money involved. I can wait for exactly half an hour. No more.’
I hung up and worked on the croissant for a bit, deliberating between showering, shaving, and sitting down to smoke my first Ducados of the day. I decided to have a smoke while shaving. Provided that nobody came too close to me the shower could wait, whereas my three-day-old stubble had to go – made me look like a deadbeat from a mile off. The day was not starting out brilliantly. I was out of coffee and clean shirts, and I had to turn the entire living room upside down before I found my keys. Then, just as I opened the downstairs door the sun hit me right between the eyes. But I hung tough, and managed to make it over to Luigi’s bar.
I walked in like I owned the place. Just in case.
‘Luigi, how about a coffee? And maybe you could save me a couple of leftover croissants – I just finished my last one. Speaking of which, what do you do, make them lift weights or something? If you could get your dick as hard as those things maybe you’d smile a little more.’
‘Listen, if you want same-day croissants, you can pay the regular price. If not, fuck off and eat the ones I give you out of the goodness of my heart. Get it?’
‘Hmmm … no, I’m not sure that I do. When I come back later to pay for the coffee you can explain it to me, more slowly. Oh … and I’ll take a pack of Ducados, too, if you don’t mind.’
‘Why don’t I just tell you to get the fuck out of here right now?’
‘Because when I’ve got cash you know I’m liable to drop a nice wad of cash in this rat hole of yours.’
‘And when you don’t I have to let you run a tab even for cigarettes. Oh, before I forget: Fina came around yesterday looking for you, she said to call her. So are you screwing her or what? She’s got some pair of tits …’
‘You’re gonna go straight to hell for your adulterous ways, you know that?’
The intense sunlight in the bar was getting unbearable, and everyone in there seemed about ready to go stark raving mad from the heat, so I made my escape, sticking to the shady side of the street for the last two blocks until I reached the entrance to my brother’s office. Thirty something stairs later I found myself at the door to Miralles & Miralles, Financial Advisors. For the record, I am the second of the two Miralles; the firstborn son was no doubt already inside, showered, shaved and dressed up in suit and tie since seven in the morning. As I walked in I called out a general team ‘hello’, and then greeted Maria with a more personalised ‘Hey, how are you?’ to which I was reciprocated with a ‘battling the phones, darling, you know … my God, you’re huge.’
‘I take care of myself. You know, like, I try to eat a lot of fat and not move around too much.’ At the far end of the offices I could see they were dealing with clients, a pair of young couples, and so I decided to keep the banter to a minimum. Only Pumares, who was weaving through the desks, looked up and lifted his eyebrows in a silent greeting. I returned the gesture and went straight to the office of Miralles the First.
He had already caught sight of me heading toward him through the glass partitions. Not an easy man to catch off-guard.
‘You might want to turn on the air conditioner, your people are roasting out there,’ I said as I walked in, just in case my Magnificent Brother had some kind of rude greeting already prepared.
‘It must be that hangover, giving you the shakes.’
‘No, no. I would have one, though, if you didn’t fuck me over so bad in the balance sheets.’
‘It’s just as well. I’ve got a job for you.’
‘I thought you were into fending for yourself.’
‘I am, but someone’s got to take out the trash. That’s always been your strong suit.’
‘Let me guess: you’re getting divorced. No: you’re moving out …’
‘Could we save the jokes for later, if you don’t mind? I need you to look into something for me.’
‘Well, let’s see … why don’t you give me a lead of some sort – like, is that “something” related in any way to the colour blue?’
‘I’m trying to locate the owner of a certain property … an old house in Les Corts. Five hundred euros are yours if you can find out before Monday.’
One thing was for sure: if one little name was worth that kind of cash to The First, it had to mean that the information would be used to cut a deal worth millions. I doubted it was anything illegal – The First would never do anything illegal – but I could smell it a mile off. He was probably going to put the squeeze on some poor sucker – either some old guy on a fixed income, or an orphan, or the last endangered flipper seal in the Mediterranean. Or something of the sort.
I tried to hit him up for a little more dough – after all, a gui
lty conscience doesn’t come cheap.
‘Well, you know, I am kind of booked up these days …’
‘Don’t give me that. Five hundred euros for a first name and a surname. Not one bit more. Yes or no?’
The same offer, twice in the space of a half hour. Some fucking life.
‘Well … I’ll need an advance.’
‘I paid you your earnings on the tenth: don’t tell me you’ve drunk your way through three thousand euros already …’
‘I also bought the newspaper and a tube of toothpaste. I want half the payment up front.’
‘I’ll give you twenty-five per cent.’
Shit. I shrugged in grudging agreement. He scooted back in his little swivel chair and took a metal cash box out of his desk drawer. A wallet full of surprise cash was much more than I had expected to earn at the start of the day, and I began to weigh my options as to how I might best invest the money while Miralles the First counted out payment number one in coins. Despite his well-tended physique, chiselled at the local gym-of-the-moment, and his tailor-made suit, he was still the living image of Dickensian avarice.
I walked around to his side of the desk and scooped up the coins.
‘Thanks, kid,’ I said, enunciating as best I could, which I do quite well.
‘I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t appreciate you calling me kid.’
‘You think I like it? I only do it to annoy you.’
With a disgusted look on his face, he handed me a Post-It with the address in question.
‘You might want to take a shower. You stink.’ I waited until I was closer to the door to respond.
‘It’s the stench of the Miralles clan, kid: you’ve got it too.’
I exited as fast as I could, so as to leave him seething beneath his Hugo Boss. I thought I heard him say something, but I had already turned to leave.
One-nothing, my advantage. Plus a tidy sum of cash in my pocket.
My next move was to head to the supermarket to stock up on a few things. I was feeling like bathing myself in a mountain of spaghetti smothered in heavy cream sauce, nice ’n’ wet, and of course I would also purchase a slab of real butter to spread on Luigi’s croissants. All this could be had for loose change, and for a bit more dinero I could fire up some potatoes, eggs, clembuterol-injected pork, and spongiformed veal’s brains. I’d drop some more dough at Luigi’s that night. Subtracting what I already owed him, I could only drink about thirty euros’ worth of booze, but getting drunk in Luigi’s bar on a limited budget is far more feasible than going to any other joint in the neighbourhood, where I would easily blow through three times as much. This, of course, takes into account the fact that with Luigi you can always run a tab for the last few. The rest of the money, then, would go toward securing some hashish – I had gone at least forty-eight hours since smoking the last of my stash.
After a quick evaluation of priorities I decided to rectify the medication issue first, and headed for the park on Calle Ondina to see if Nico was around. Luckily I found him in his usual spot – no easy feat in the morning hours. Mainly because mornings are not my forte. But there he was, sitting atop a park bench, his clunky boots resting on the seat part. Next to him I recognised a friend of his, a guy who looks like he just escaped from Mauthausen. The human race knows no middle ground: it’s either Marks & Spencer pret-a-porter or shit-stained fake Nike jogging suits.
‘What do you want, chief?’
‘An eighth.’
After a pause that made me suspect he was caught in some sort of autistic trance thing, he wandered aimlessly toward the edge of the park, leaving me alone with the Mauthausen guy, who was not looking particularly lucid himself.
‘So, like, do you think the price of an eighth has gone up, you know, because of the euro?’ I asked, more than anything just to see if the guy was still alive.
‘What do I know, man: it’s all the same shit …’
That about summed up his interest level, though I was genuinely concerned with the answer. If a thousand pesetas equals six euros, then five thousand would be thirty. Rounding down, of course. No doubt Nico had figured out a way to take advantage of the scheme and raise his prices. The little guy, meanwhile, seemed to have entered a kind of personal-reflection moment which I thought best not to interrupt, so I lit a Ducados and sat down on the bench for a smoke. One great thing about stoners is that you can sit down next to them and smoke in total silence for half an hour and it’s no big deal. They can entertain themselves. Thirty seconds in a lift with a Registered Windows User, on the other hand, is enough to give you migraines. Of course, there are plenty of things for which stoners are hopeless: their conversation stinks, you can’t ever borrow money from them, things like that. And then the stoners who go straight and become traffic cops or logic professors end up creating pure chaos out of things like roundabouts and counterfact conditional equations. At that point, I reached into my pocket and produced the Post-It that The First had given me, to see if I was anywhere near the address he had written ‘Jaume Guillamet 15’, it said, in his superb penmanship. For a few moments I focused on trying to place the location in my head. I know the street well enough: number fifteen had to be at the upper end, and so I mentally walked up Guillamet and tried to picture the buildings on either side of the street, but anyone who attempts such an exercise will inevitably prove one of my more original hypotheses – erroneously attributed to Parmenides – which states that reality is a circumstance filled with voids and holes. In the middle of all this Nico returned with the hash so that was the end of my astral trip. I said goodbye to him and the friend, with that facsimile of courtesy one adopts when speaking to one’s principal drug supplier, and I left via the south end of the park. A day of joints, food, and booze now lay before me. The only thing that sullied my horizon somewhat was the prospect of bumping into Fina. It is common knowledge that women, too, are like black holes, capable of absorbing all the attention that one lavish upon on them. Obviously, this excludes women who charge in cash for their services, and unfortunately Fina did not charge, at least not in the money sense.
So I took off, and on the way to the supermarket I made a detour to check out the building numbers on Jaume Guillamet.
Turning off Santa Clara, the first number I spotted was fifty-seven; all I had to do was backtrack a few yards. Even from a distance I quickly located the building that The First was interested in. I had walked by it so many times that I had never really noticed it, but now it seemed like a rather incongruous structure given the context: a turn-of-the-century cottage, with a little garden enclosed by a brick wall from which two tall trees rose up. It was kind of hard to understand how the hell that little shack, with its boarded-up windows and a sprawling yard that took up the entire width of the sidewalk, had managed to survive amid the line-up of eight- and nine-story apartment buildings. That one single structure turned the entire stretch of Guillamet into something out of a painting by Delvaux or Magritte: ruins, statues, train stations with neither trains nor passengers. It was a kind of absence, an eerie stillness, a portrait of something that was missing. Naturally I wasn’t about to ring the doorbell – that is, if there even was a doorbell. The very small amount of reason I possessed advised me not to take that step until I showered, put on some clean clothes, and thought up a good excuse for whoever might open the front door. But I did stop to look for a second or two as I walked past. The wall was about two yards high, and the abundant ivy that covered it seemed healthy, indicating that the building was not entirely abandoned. I walked round the perimeter of the garden in search of a door, a sign, or a bell of some sort, and in the heat of my investigation I stepped directly into a pile of dog shit as I rounded the first corner. Serious dog shit, the kind you practically never see anymore now that everyone goes around scooping up the turds of their euro-pets with little Marks & Spencer bags. I tried to wipe off the mess by rubbing my shoe back and forth on the curb, but the crap had gotten wedged in the little corner between the s
ole and the heel and so I had to take off the shoe. I looked around for a piece of paper or something to wipe it off with, and next to a lamppost by the wall I found one of those little red rags that you hang from the back of your car to signal that you’re driving with a heavy load. I was not fully convinced that I wouldn’t stink of designer dog shit by the time I reached the supermarket, but I had to abort the effort once the rag was rendered untouchable.
Given the high stress level of this kind of detective work, I deemed it was time to finish up for the day. So I tossed the rag on the ground (I always enjoy reminding myself that I live in Barcelona instead of Copenhagen) and I made a break for the supermarket before it closed.
I don’t know why but at Dia, the discount supermarket, it always feels as though someone’s filming a movie about Vietnam. But it is cheaper than Caprabo at the Illa shopping centre, where you half-expect to find Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers come out dancing a polka in the frozen food section. To my aforementioned purchases I added a bunch of idiotic impulse buys that I found along the aisles, a veritable obstacle course of giant unopened cardboard boxes that looked as though a Hercules had just airvac’d them down in a parachute. On the endless cashier’s line I double-checked that my selections did not exceed my original budget, and paid. Then, in a stroke of brilliant foresight, I remembered to stop at the tobacco shop and buy a pack of Fortunas for my hash joints.
When I returned home I demonstrated remarkable restraint and waited to roll my first joint until after showering (by then, even I had begun to notice that I smelled like a sweaty dancing bear). But as soon as I got out of the shower, like a triumphant baby dolphin, I didn’t even bother drying off: I went straight to the sofa and got to work on the hash. I rolled a hefty little reefer, and given my two days of abstinence it wasn’t long before that nice little pleasure tickle began to take effect. It was a shame that the general state of the living room did not match the immaculate condition of my freshly cleaned and deodorised body. My bourgeois weaknesses always come out after a shower – maybe that’s why I shower as little as possible – and so I sat there staring at the blank television screen hoping that by contemplating the nothingness before me, I would overcome the sudden urge I felt to get up and start cleaning house. It’s incredible how illuminating a turned-off television set can be: it reflects you, looking back at you, right in front of it. Fuck.
