Southern Seas by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Page B

seafood platter that would include more snails or a dish of baked dorado fish. Carvalho chose the dorado, both because he wanted to stay on the white wine, and because the fish would help him reduce the swelling under his eyes and improve the state of his liver. He liked to eat at Leopoldo’s from time to time. It was a restaurant he had retrieved from the mythology of his adolescence.
    One summer, when his mother was in Galicia, his father had invited him out to a restaurant. This was a rare event in itself, because his father was the kind of man who believed that all restaurants fleeced their customers and served up garbage. But someone had told him about a restaurant in the Barrio Chino which offered huge portions at reasonable prices. It was there that he took Carvalho. The young man stuffed himself on squid alla Romana—the most sophisticated dish he knew—while his father stayed with more familiar dishes.
    ‘It’s certainly good. And there’s lots of it. Now let’s see what it’s going to cost us!’
    A long time passed before he set foot in a restaurant again. But he always remembered Leopoldo’s as the place where he had been initiated into a ritual that was to become a passion. He returned many years later, when the restaurant was no longer run by the attentive man who had taken their order and treated them with all the courtesy due to regular and discriminating customers. Now it was merely a good-quality fish restaurant, where a local petit-bourgeoisie mingled with people from the north of the city who had heard of the restaurant by repute.
    Carvalho had chosen a diet of fish and chilled white wine. Whereas once he used to fight off anxiety attacks by diving into snack bars and restaurants and ordering with a combination of greed and good taste, he now tried to overcome them by consuming the country’s reserves of white wine.
    The proprietor was surprised at the modesty of his choice for dessert, and his omission of a liqueur after coffee. ‘I’m in a hurry,’ Carvalho said, by way of excuse. But on reaching the door, he decided that he had acted against nature, against his nature. He sat down again, called over the proprietor and asked for a double measure of ice-cold brandy. After the first sip, he knew he was returning to his normal self. My liver? To hell with it! It’s mine, after all. It’ll do what I tell it. He ordered another double brandy and decided that the transfusion that he had needed for several days was now complete.
    He left the restaurant and walked down Calle Aurora in search of the lost scenery of his adolescence. He passed a building whose modern appearance was surprising in a street that dated from the assassination of Noi del Sucre. He saw a group of people hovering around a doorway, and noticed a poster advertising a series of discussions on the
roman noir
. With alcoholic self-assurance, Carvalho joined the people waiting for one of the sessions to begin. He knew these types. They had that look of hard-boiled eggs which was common to intellectuals everywhere, although among Spaniards it had a particular inflection: the hard-boiled eggs seemed less solid than in other latitudes. They had an awareness, born of underdevelopment, that the egg was in danger. They were divided into tribes, according to background and affinity. There was one tribe that enjoyed a higher intellectual status than the others. This could be seen in the way they were regarded in the eyes of others. Seemingly casually, people went out of their way to cross their paths, and felt a need to greet them and be recognized in return.
    The session finally got under way, and Carvalho found himselfin a blue auditorium, together with a hundred or so people who were eager to demonstrate that they knew more about the
roman noir
than the seven or eight experts on the platform.
    The platform contribution began with a ‘confidence-boosting’ operation in which the several brains limbered up by identifying the function,