Vanilla Salt (22 page)

“Hmm. This could well end up late. It’s a long, complicated story. I could even tell you in instalments.” He laughs.

“I have time. Lot of time. And I no want sleep. You tell me please.”

Àlex’s older brother was what might be called a “ten-out-of-ten” kid. He had everything: good looks, brains, ambition and a pleasant nature. He was nine years older, a considerable difference. Their parents were more than satisfied with the good marks, excellent behaviour, sports medals and, in a nutshell, all their boy’s achievements.

They expected very little of Àlex, however. The baby of the family was assigned the roles of clown, cuddly toy, cute kid, plaything and pride and joy of the household. Everything he did amused his parents, who cheered him on. Hence, he grew up trying to make everyone happy. He was the balance, the counterpoint and compensation for the seriousness of his big brother, who shouldered the burden of responsibility, of being the one who would eventually sustain the family.

His brother excelled at school. He wanted to study aerospace engineering, but the family had scant means to help him. However, since he was so brilliant, he got a five-year scholarship to study at one of the most prestigious universities in his field. His parents were beside themselves with joy and gazed at him adoringly. The university was a long way from home, in the United States. The boy set off and the parents cried with happiness. A son studying in the United States and all because of his own
merit! A lad from Vall d’Aran was flying high, heading for the Mount Olympus of the most privileged people, going off to study in America!

It was like a dream. But it wasn’t. He’d done this all by himself. No one had given him any gift. He’d studied till he was dead on his feet, with saintly devotion, as his mother said. And he’d done it. All his efforts had been recognized with the most valuable reward: the best degree at the best university. His proud mother told everyone she met in the street, in the queue at the greengrocer’s or at the hairdresser’s. After getting the good news she became a little vain, wanting to look good when they pointed at her in the street, saying, “There’s the mother of that boy who’s gone off to study in Florida.” She bought a new dress and a sexy dressing gown, which she referred to as her
déshabillé
. Her husband didn’t understand what she had bought. “A desa-what?” he asked, intrigued.

“Oh, Manuel, we’ll never get out of this hole if you carry on like this,” she sighed. “This is in all the fashion magazines. A
dés-ha-bi-llé
. I’m going to wear it in the mornings in the hotel when we go to America to see our boy. You have to look nice when they bring you breakfast: tropical fruit, hot chocolate, coffee, croissants, churros…”

Her husband burst out laughing. “Come on, girl! Churros? In America they don’t eat churros for breakfast. The only Spanish dish will be you in that
déshabillé
out of the fashion magazines, and you certainly frittered away our money on that. Churros are more Spanish than flamenco.”

On and on they went. “What would you know about America and what they do there? Of course they have churros! Do you think they don’t eat croissants? In America they have the best of everything from everywhere, and churros are our best thing.” They argued but were happy and laughed a lot.

For Àlex’s mother, America was as far away as Mars, as exotic as Carmen Miranda and as glamorous as a film starring Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers. She packed their bags so they’d be ready when their son summoned them to come and see him, and meanwhile she dreamt of having coffee with Shirley Temple, Vivien Leigh or Clark Gable, who, she was sure, would be their son’s next-door neighbours.

The longed-for day of setting out for America never came. They never saw their son again. The first year he asked them not to come and visit. His parents were surprised, but of course they agreed not to come, because, to the extent that they could, they obeyed his every command, granted his every wish. They thought he needed every spare moment for studying such a difficult course – and, moreover, in English! But that was only part of the story.

Àlex’s mother never got to wear her
déshabillé
that first year and she started going less frequently to the hairdresser and eventually ended up with long hair that looked like chocolate mousse and cream: dark brown (where the dye still held) topped by white (where it had grown out).

Their son would soon be coming to spend the summer holidays in Vall d’Aran and they made a large banner with the words “Welcome home, dear son!” to take with them to the airport. Àlex’s mother went back to the hairdresser’s. The last letter from their son informed them that he’d be a little late arriving and instead of coming at the beginning of July he’d be there mid-August. “It would be better for me to stay a while longer in Florida. I have to do some training at the university, which will be a great help for my classes after the holidays.” His parents were both sad and happy. Although they missed him and longed to see him, they also celebrated his excellent performance.

August was almost upon them. The crickets were singing their summer symphony when the phone rang. Àlex’s mother ran to answer it with her usual “I’ll get it!” They’d had no news from their son for days and the call was almost certainly from him. It wouldn’t be long before they had him back in the bosom of the family, and they were quite on edge,
but also thrilled at the prospect of seeing him soon. A few minutes later, she came back with a waxy, completely blank face, and said, “Our boy, your brother, is dead.”

Àlex continued: “We only found out what happened years later. My brother studied very hard, nearly all the time, but he had also joined a far-right group, a xenophobic terrorist organization similar to the Ku Klux Klan. They went out one night on a ‘clarification’ mission, as they called their activities, with the aim of terrorizing a family that had just arrived from Haiti. They wanted to lay down the law and teach them a lesson – that the whites were in charge. Some members of the group were armed, but my brother wasn’t, because he was too young and a foreigner. Despite his foreignness, he was seen as one of the ‘good guys’, because he was white and following a prestigious university course. It was good for the organization to have members with such a brilliant future as the one that seemed to lie ahead for my brother.

“The plan was simple. They were going to surround the house, leave signs identifying their organization and fire a few shots. They couldn’t imagine that the Haitians had been warned and would be ready for them. There were a lot of them. They were strong and some were armed. The white kids, who were so sure of their intellectual superiority and organizational genius, were perfect – or I should say very imperfect – amateurs. The whole thing was a huge free-for-all and my brother copped it. He was hit by a bullet, and nobody knows whether it was fired by a black man or a white man.

“We only found out years later what really happened that evening in early August more than forty years ago, and my father never knew. The death of my big brother and their older son was also the death of the family. I was only nine years old, and for me it meant the beginning of a nightmare. My mother rarely said a word after that, and a few years later my father went out to work one day and never came home. I went
from being the spoilt brat, the funny little clown who made everyone laugh, the Peter Pan who wasn’t supposed to grow up, to being told off for everything I did. I no longer amused them. They didn’t laugh at my jokes or applaud my antics. My father projected his image of my big brother on to me, but I wasn’t in any way up to the standards he had set. The frustration was constant, and I felt more and more useless and pathetic, and less and less valued and loved.

“For years I believed I was entirely to blame for my parents’ unhappiness, because I didn’t get good marks at school, wasn’t good at any sport, never said a kind word and was unable to form a structured argument. My father tried to the best of his ability, with private teachers, intensive courses, help with reading… but I didn’t improve. On the contrary, I rebelled and, in particular, I completely withdrew into myself. Over the years I’ve learnt that I didn’t have the most important things a kid needs: trust and unconditional love. Every morning when my mother came to wake me up, she said ‘I love you lots’, but those were only words, an empty declaration that was contradicted in her distant demeanour the rest of the day.

“We didn’t know how or why my brother had died, except that it had happened in America, a country that, in the family circle, ceased to be paradise on earth and became a hostile land, full of delinquents and bad people who had brought about the ruin of my family. Anything that came from ‘that continent of barbarians who killed my son’, as my father constantly repeated in his attempts not to give it a name, was shunned as if it carried the bubonic plague. According to my father, it was the place, America, which had killed his boy. ‘If he’d stayed here to study, this would never have happened. That country is full of barbarians,’ he kept saying.

“I also had a horror of the place, and when they told us at school that the food we ate almost every day had come here centuries ago from
that continent which inspired such terror in me, I decided never to eat anything from there ever again. They didn’t understand my phobia at home, but didn’t pay much attention either. In fact, I was almost transparent and invisible as far as my parents were concerned. We all stopped living after my brother died. My mother never went back to the hairdresser’s, but wore her hair in a bun which, over the years, got bigger, heavier and more and more tightly coiled, a kind of metaphor for her pain and strength.

“That
botifarra
you made today was really good. Will you give me the recipe?” Àlex asks, abruptly changing the subject as if to banish the solemn confessional atmosphere that had been building up in his room.

“The
botifarra
, I buy it, Àlex.” Annette can’t think of any word of consolation. She’s overwhelmed. How much can one person suffer? She kisses him on the lips and leaves his room.

12

PEPPERS

Annette’s hardly slept a wink. And when she did nod off nightmares assailed her. She can’t stop thinking about Àlex’s moving story. They meet in the kitchen. She makes herself a cup of very strong tea, trying to open her eyes and, blearily, to focus on Àlex as he works, totally absorbed by some courgettes, which he’s hollowing out before filling them with crabmeat in béchamel sauce. He seems serene, as if nothing happened last night. Annette’s surprised by his composure.

“How you are this morning?” she asks.

“As long as we can keep working, Annette, everything’s fine. We’re booked out today. It’s amazing. Make the most of it. Keep an eye on the business, don’t close your eyes to things and don’t imagine this is going to last for ever.”

“Why no? Can Bret always full.”

“There’s a big difference between Can Bret and you. They love money and you love food. Business and passion don’t mix. The Can Bret people have two daughters who think they’re Paris Hilton. The parents have to maintain them as such, so if their little darlings want a nice pink car, then the boss puts up the price of the
escalivada
– which nobody notices too much since it’s a small percentage on the price of a few
charcoal-roasted aubergines and peppers – or cuts the steak a bit thinner, or squeezes a bit more out of the immigrants he’s got working for him on shit contracts. It’s a piece of cake. You, however, have all sorts of inner hassles over what you need to do to get the business going or letting Graça work fewer hours. You need the pressure of a couple of kids wanting a PlayStation. Then you’ll bare your she-wolf fangs and start buying the cheapest courgettes. And you’ll pay more attention to what’s happening with the business.”

“Why you say this?” Annette is alarmed by his mysterious tone.

“Because Graça’s stealing.”

Àlex has discovered this bit by bit, with a missing bag of hazelnuts, a packet of rice, some chicken breasts, half a dozen eggs, a couple of lettuces… At first he thought he was getting absent-minded, forgetful. But something was always missing, trifles, small amounts of inexpensive food which would never noticeably upset the balance of the restaurant’s takings. Then he started to be more watchful and to set traps, leaving things carefully set out in the fridge and memorizing the order. By the time he came back to start cooking for the evening menu some small item had disappeared. Graça was no expert, because she never covered up the gap.

Annette almost chokes on her tea. The revelation feels like a pot containing a large, very prickly cactus falling on her head out of a clear-blue sky.

“Are you keeping an eye on the till?” Àlex asks. “Have you noticed if any money is missing?”

“Yes,” she admits. “Little bit. I think I make mistake with change because so much pressure, hurry at lunch, it easy for to happen.”

“Graça has six kids. She’s a she-wolf and can’t bear seeing them going without. She wants them to have a computer, or a new sweater and Heaven knows what else. If she nicks a bit of food she saves on
shopping and can put that aside for something else. If she can pinch a few euros, all the better. Don’t get me wrong. She’s no delinquent. She just loves her kids. So now you know, what are you going to do about it?”

“I no know. I speak with her. Try make better, hear she explain…”

“And try to help her, right? You see? You play at being a business-woman, but you’re not made to manage a business. The Can Bret boss would go to the cops and make her give back what she’s stolen with interest. He’d even get a court order to seize Frank’s wages.”

“And what you would do?”

“Exactly the same as you. First, listen to her and then get her to promise it won’t happen again. Ah yes, and I’d give her a raise. I suppose that option’s already occurred to you,” Àlex says bitingly.

“Yes. I a squatting duck.”