It’s like this: like one of those ships that, after dancing the night away with an iceberg to the rhythm of music disarranged by Mr. Stokowski, discovers it’s sinking amid dissonant passages of arctic wind.
So it goes.
Sometimes I can even string together a full sentence with true grace, my words offering a discernible choreography, and, for a brief moment, I cease to be the person I am and become the person everyone else wants me to be.
Let me explain: I’m one of those disgraceful aberrations of nature who, if you ask them where they are, will most likely answer, “On planet Earth.” What I mean is that I’m not someone you would consider situated within the real context of things. I’m sure it’s not the first time you’ve heard of people like me, individuals the different art forms purport to redeem and present as charming, unique, antiheroes, when really we’re true rotters: original forms of the monstrous who do nothing but disrupt the established order. Wastes of time in perpetual motion.
Right now, for example, I haven’t the slightest notion of my geographical location. But apropos the ship, I think that, for once, I have a story that, yes, takes place on planet Earth and that, yes, is worth telling. I don’t know if it happened a long or short time ago; please, don’t ask for specifics of that kind.
I remember that the steam from the pots made it hard to see and that at first we didn’t know if it was night or day. If we’d been on one of those transatlantic Titanics plunging toward the bottom of the sea, we would’ve been in the machine room, unaware of the brewing catastrophe until the inevitable final collapse, asking each other with nervous little laughs why everything was beginning to tilt sideways and nobody had told us anything.
I remember, too, that sometimes someone burst out laughing, sometimes someone wept.
The relationship to the space was the last thing to change. Shiva had warned us about this, so it didn’t take us by surprise. We were quick to adjust to the furious economy of movement, to the harmonic displacement.
“In the precise gesture resides the secret of the perfection of the Whole,” Shiva said, moving through a space custom-made to fit him. In a way, what ended up happening did nothing but confirm the veracity of his personal credo. And so, every useless gesture was forgotten, I remember. And I remember Mike.
“Someday somebody is going to make a movie of my life, Argie,” Mike says.
Mike is Australian. Mike is crying. Mike is the hero of this story. Mike is peeling an onion.
“And I won’t be going to see that movie,” I answered.
I’m cleaning an oven. And the conversation, or what’s understood as a conversation around here, ends more or less right there. Running our mouths, we’ve been warned, is superfluous and without justification, of no use to the perfection of the Whole.
Mike has to peel multiple kilos of onions, and I’ve got a couple dirty ovens left to clean. The dish that Mike’s working on is called “Seaside Fantasy,” and the onions have to be cut in the shape of those little stars that traipse across the bottom of the sea. The bottom of the sea, that watery place where, in one way or another, sooner or later, we’re all heading.
When I was eight years old, I was forbidden from seeing the movie Fantasia. To be more precise: when I was eight years old, I was forbidden from seeing the movie Fantasia again. I’d already seen it five times. But that wasn’t why I was forbidden from seeing it. Fantasia is that Walt Disney movie. The one with the classical music, Mickey Mouse, and the bewitched broomsticks carrying buckets and buckets of water until the sorcerer’s castle floods and looks like the bottom of the sea.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Because, really, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the only thing that interests me in the whole movie. I don’t remember the rest of the movie; honestly, I remember almost nothing but The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Seriously, the thing is, it was the bewitched broomstick scene that turned me into the person the rest of the world doesn’t want me to be, and, in a way, in my life, there’s a before and an after to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Because, you know, before seeing Fantasia, I was different. At least that’s what my mother says. That Walt Disney movie drove me crazy, she says.
The restaurant is called Savoy Fair and is located in London. So far so good. What I haven’t entirely figured out yet is what the hell I’m doing in Savoy Fair. I think I already said: I clean ovens. I am doing a stage at Savoy Fair. In a stage, you pay to be a slave, though it sounds better on paper. My parents paid so that, in London, at Savoy Fair, in a gastronomic stage, I could be a slave to that deity named Shiva, incarnated in a mortal named Roderick Shastri.
Running our mouths, we’ve been warned, is superfluous and unjustifiable, of no use to the perfection of the Whole.
This whole stage thing comes as a sort of punishment for something I did or stopped doing two or three months before coming to London. I’m not going to get into the sordid details. Suffice it to say (I’m going to use the official version here, my mother’s version) that “I did not behave at all properly with the daughter of a friend of my father.” A debatable account because, among other things, my mother doesn’t know Leticia, she doesn’t know the true Leticia. The “daughter of a friend of my father with whom I did not behave at all properly” is, to my unsound mind, an exceedingly simple way of seeing things.
But it doesn’t matter. They punished me by sending me to a restaurant in London. Tía Ana lives in London, and I live with Tía Ana. Perfect, as far as I’m concerned. I always got along well with Tía Ana, and it was Tía Ana who took me to see Fantasia for the first time. What I’m trying to say is that my debt to Tía Ana is immense, even though every time the subject comes up, she looks away and starts talking about cars. Tía Ana’s house is close to Saville Road. I sleep there, in the room above the garage, but I spend most of my time at Savoy Fair. Weekends included.
My mother was the one who came up with the restaurant idea. She thinks I like to cook; that cooking, along with Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is one of the few things that interests me. The plan is for me to return home to Buenos Aires cured and for me to open my own restaurant with the money from my inheritance from my grandfather and then marry Leticia, the Leticia that my mother—and the rest of the world—has known since the day of her birth, not the Leticia that only I know, the true Leticia.
The true Leticia laughed her ass off all the way to the airport and talked nonstop about Laurita, dear little Laura, her dead older sister. I remember; Leticia shouted something in my ear about how Laurita didn’t drown in Punta del Este. That’s another of the many official versions that characterize our illustrious lineage, she said. Laura, the perfect Laurita Feijóo Pearson, is a desaparecida, you know, she got mixed up with the only son of Daniel Chevieux, Father’s law partner, remember? And apparently they got picked up together and turned up drowned, which is true, but it was in Río de la Plata and not Punta del Este. They were thrown out of an airplane. Five years ago. Desaparecidos and all of that.
I said I didn’t understand at all, and Leticia pulled over to the side of the road and started to hit me with her beautiful little fists. She hit me and told me to hit her and then to “not behave at all properly” with her. She opened a little handbag and passed me . . . all those things. Leather, metal, silk; you know. With a complicit look and knowing smile.
And that’s the story, and the truth is that I kind of miss Leticia; there are times when the whole thing is too much for me, and it’s as if I’m seeing myself from outside. My whole life, I mean. I see it as if it were that of another person. I read in a magazine once that people who were clinically dead for a few seconds experience the same thing. They see themselves from outside. Maybe I’ve been clinically dead for years, who knows, ever since I saw Fantasia for the first time, and what I see at times like this makes it so these twenty-five years of life make very little sense. As if important parts of the story were missing. And I get so tired trying to find those missing parts.
When this happens, the best thing to do is to think about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Brooms and buckets careening around out of control before the perplexed eyes of a mouse who has just altered the order of the universe. No matter how many times my psychiatrist tells me that I don’t have to think about it, I swear that I feel a lot better when I do. Seriously.
Mike, the Australian, in case anyone is interested, claims that the specialty magazines are mistaken: Roderick Shastri’s cuisine is not that “creative” or “sublime” or “full of enchanting suggestion.” Roderick Shastri’s thing, Mike explains to me, is merely a form of guilty pleasure for both the anti-Thatcher British snob and for the defender of the Empire who weeps when he sees all those miniseries about the Raj.
It’s enough to look up and guess at the true identities of the silhouettes fighting there above, through the smoke and vertigo.
Precisely for that reason, beyond what Mike says, there’s one thing you have to acknowledge about Roderick Shastri: he was in just the right place at just the right time. Just like Hitler, if you think about it a little.
Roderick Shastri is the head chef at Savoy Fair. He’s also a perfect son of a bitch. The man’s story goes more or less like this: son of a headstrong couple of immigrants who worshipped the Queen Mother more than the Khali, Roderick Shastri became the protégé of the elderly lady who employed his parents. So he became familiar with the best schools and the ambiguous apologies of an un-united kingdom with serious identity issues.
Tía explains all of this to me from underneath a Rolls Royce. Tía Ana is an expert surgeon of designer cars. Important people bring their cars to her so she can figure out the reason for that annoying little noise, that peculiar and irritating sound, the one flat note in the soundtrack of harmonious nirvana and the Mechanical Whole. Tía Ana has been into cars since she was a kid, ever since she linked Buenos Aires and Tierra de Fuego in a doorless Range Rover. And so it was that my aunt earned, with honors and without a care, the title of the family lunatic.
“Luckily you’ve come along now to relieve me,” Tía Ana laughed. She’s a great tía, my tía. She’s a lucky person.
Roderick Shastri is a lucky person, Mike explains to me while picking out peaches, touching them lightly with his fingertips. I mean, the same thing could’ve happened to any other Englishman with Indian heritage. It happened to him. And—as sometimes occurs—lucky people live with the terror that their luck will run out, that their luck will decide to favor another. Day to day, this terror changes lucky people, I think; it turns them into something else, turns them into perfectly lucky sons of bitches. These perfectly lucky sons of bitches need then to surround themselves with huge quantities of unlucky people. Modern history is full of perfectly lucky sons of bitches, if you think about it a little. Come and see.
“Good morning, my rotters,” says Roderick Shastri.
“Welcome, master,” we answer in unison.
True, it seems like a joke. But no. Roderick Shastri requires that we call him master. You might not know it, but humiliation, don’t ask me why, is one of the most important aspects of work in a kitchen. It’s like this: the preparation of a meal consists of hundreds of little tasks, and each one includes different and subtle levels of degradation. Order in a kitchen is as rigid as it is complex, and that’s good, Mike tells me. He doesn’t have to insist all that much because that’s not exactly what interests me about the kitchen: the phenomenon itself, that’s what interests me; the order that, viewed from the right place and with the right kind of eyes, offers the keys to understanding the universe. I tried to explain it to Mike at the time. It’s a shame that I didn’t insist on the subject. But better not to think about that.
He’s the ill-fated favorite, and I’ve turned out to be something like the monster in the attic who always emerges more or less intact.
Now, there are two ways to come to terms with the enlightenment of this order. With joy or with horror. I don’t think there’s any need to point out what the gospel according to Roderick Shastri is. In Savoy Fair, you leave the bottom of the pool with the faint hope that, after a week or two, you will have risen to the lukewarm mirage of a slightly less humiliating state of employ. The methods of sabotage and the levels of intrigue involved in ascending this slippery pyramid reach moments of creativity and forms of subtlety far more sophisticated than all of Roderick Shastri’s dishes put together, believe me. And, in this panorama, the worst thing that can happen to someone who considers himself well-adjusted is to be forced to clean the ovens. That’s why my specific job at Savoy Fair consists of cleaning the ovens most every day.
Mike worries about my specific job, which he considers part of my “predisposition for the abyss.” He worries about it so much that once I even tried to explain to him my version of the whole deal: if you’re in last place, there’s no reason to worry about maintaining your position. Or to defend it against people who are on their way up and people who come crashing down from the heights and try to grab ahold of some ledge. Things are easier like that. It’s enough to look up through the smoke and vertigo and guess all the true identities of the silhouettes fighting there above. Or, better yet, to shut your eyes.
To think effectively about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it is essential to shut your eyes. Which is why, in my modest and dubious judgment, my specific job at Savoy Fair is truly enviable.
“The movie of my life,” Mike explains to me through clouds of steam, “opens with a scene in sepia. I escape the farm and arrive, without anyone fully understanding how, to my grandfather’s restaurant in Sydney. My mother calls the police, of course. Someone thinks that I’ve been abducted by a dingo, one of those wild yellow dogs. They find me three hours later in the kitchen of my grandfather’s restaurant in Sydney. I entered through the backdoor. It’s a Monday, a day when my grandfather’s restaurant is closed. I’m cooking. I just turned five. Cut. The music rises and the credits roll. Nice, right?”
Mike comes from a family of famous Australian chefs, probably the only famous Australian chefs in Australia. He shows me a photograph: men dressed in immaculate white, smiling in front of the whimsical formations of Hanging Rock. For him, this whole stage thing at Savoy Fair is far more important than it is for me. Which isn’t surprising because I always have the impression that people take things much more seriously than they should. I talked about this with my psychiatrist. I also talked about it extensively with my father’s friend’s youngest daughter, Leticia, but she didn’t find it all that interesting. Leticia has her own thing and, even though she doesn’t take things too seriously, there is this one thing: her older sister. Leticia never stops looking at the pictures of Laura and, when she finally puts them away, she looks at me with that strange smile and shows me the best way to tie a slipknot and explains to me the “logistical variations for the day’s combat.” Then she ties me up, or I tie her up, while she reads sections of her disappeared sister’s personal diary. Laura has round handwriting; instead of putting dots above her i’s, she puts little hearts. We have to fight against the goal of bourgeoisie domination, now or never, we more than anyone; it’s a matter of life or death, Laura wrote in her personal diary.
For Mike, this stage is a matter of life or death. Six months ago he did another one in Paris. He lasted a week. He spent his time unsticking onion peels from the floor. With his fingernails. For three days. He had a nervous breakdown, and they sent him back to Australia.
“I’m still not entirely sure what to do with that part of the movie of my life. Does it have to include the nervous breakdown?”
My knowledge with respect to film is quite limited, I tell him. Mike tosses a tomato into the air and skewers it with the point of the knife.
“Why?”
“It’s a long story. My psychiatrist says it has to do with a movie I saw when I was a kid.”
“Uh-huh.”
It’s clear that Mike isn’t all that interested in my movie. His is more than enough. The only person I know who is interested in my perception of the world as it relates to the only movie that reveals the transgressive side of the always-polite Mickey Mouse is my little brother, Alejo. Maybe that’s why “terrifying things”—as we’ve come to call them—are always happening to him.
Alejo is eighteen years old, and he’s the pride and joy of the family. Every family should have someone like Alejo. Alejo is the one who will take over Father’s businesses and all of that. As long as he survives the terrifying things that keep happening to him every five minutes.
Like the time he and his tricycle fell off the second story. Like when he almost lost his eyes in chemistry class. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Alejo has spent a good part of his eighteen years in each and every one of Buenos Aires’s emergency rooms. Several of Alejo’s closest friends are on-call doctors. In short: he’s the ill-fated favorite, and I’ve turned out to be something like the monster in the attic who always emerges more or less intact.
One more reason to doubt the existence of God.
Roderick Shastri is God. At least that’s what he believes. They call him Shiva, and he accepts the nickname with pleasure. They call him that because he moves with surprising grace and because implicit in the nature of his dance is our always-impending destruction, the imminent beginning of the end of all his rotters. Roderick Shastri is four feet, eleven inches tall. Which makes him the shortest god in history, I think. And yet, his particular cosmogony is quite impressive.
The private pantheon of Shiva, Mike recites, is organized thusly: in the Savoy Fair kitchen, the chef’s apprentices—us—receive orders and humiliations from the commis chef. The commis chef is castigated by one of the chefs de partie, also known as specialists, given that they are dedicated to different stations, pastries, meats, fish, etc. At the same level as the specialists is the chef tournant, an especially dangerous and mobile figure, always appearing when you least expect it. The chefs de partie and the chef tournant humbly bow their heads in the presence of the sous chef, Shastri’s ever-alert second. Above all of them dances Shiva, who, when he’s bored, raises and lowers them, promotes and demotes them, at random. Perennial maneuvers of an idle god, whose whims lead, for example, to a chef tournant suddenly finding himself, to his horror, in the place of a newly elevated inexpert apprentice. Then comes the time for the settling of scores.
The only possible way to avoid these ritual humiliations is to ascend the pyramid without drawing too much attention to yourself and, when you get too close to the sun, move on to another restaurant of lower prestige and become head chef and, with a little luck, get famous. Meanwhile, you have to earn your place in heaven, season others’ desserts with pepper, make silky sauces lumpy, jack up the oven temperature when nobody is looking, and wonder aloud what those pink stains on the neck of the nearest chef de partie could be.
For me, Australia is a lost-eyed kangaroo hopping across the ass of the world.
Because I’m so low on the totem pole, nobody really worries about what I do or don’t see. They call me “Argie” or “The Ipanema Kid,” depending on the geographic capacities of whoever is dressing me down. In any case, they don’t talk to me much; to them, I’m the nutjob who likes cleaning the ovens. That’s why what happens now is very strange, an event you might even call historical.
“You’re Argentine, right?” Shastri asks me one morning.
“Yes, master.”
“Do you know what the Falklands are?”
Falklands Salad, Falklands Soup, Falklands Fudge, I think.
I can’t recall if they appear on the menu.
“I think it’s a frozen dessert, master.”
“Little imbecile,” Rodrick Shastri goes off. “Listen up: from today onward, you and I are at war.”
And he tells me that, from now on, my specific job at Savoy Fair will be to clean the ovens, all the ovens. Shastri gets a little nervous when the commis chef explains to him in a tremulous whisper that the only thing I’ve done since I arrived at the restaurant is clean the ovens.
That night when I go home to my aunt’s house, I find out everything. The news is in all the papers and on TV. The Falklands are the Malvina Islands, Argentina claimed and, for that reason, invaded those islands that, up until a few hours before, were a British colony. That’s why, for some, they are called the Falklands and, for others, the Malvinas. It seems complicated, but it’s not really. The fact is that Argentina and England are now at war, and Tía Ana is very worried. She doesn’t think the local aristocracy will continue entrusting the engines of the empire to an invading mechanic, no matter how nationalized she is, no matter how inerasably English her last name is. It’s a beautiful night, the night of April 2, 1982. Not a cloud in the sky, and a breeze imported from the seas of the north is blowing.
We’ll keep you informed, says a radioman on The End of the World News.
In a way, it was my fault Mike committed suicide. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
That same night, I called my mother on the phone; she was crying. She cried across the Atlantic thanks to the progress of advanced technology. She’s crying because Alejo was sent to fight on the islands. Alejo was already on the Malvinas. It didn’t really surprise me, to tell the truth. My mother cried over the phone, and I couldn’t get out of my head the idea of Alejo hitting the dirt, the idea of Alejo firing in the snow with good aim and awful luck, the idea that my mother’s transoceanic tears were an alternate way of asking what I was doing in London and Alejo in the islands, why did I get a stage at a London restaurant while poor Alejo got a pair of combat boots with holes in them and an oversized uniform.
Which leads me to think again—and I close my eyes—about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and about the state of things in the universe. On the one hand, of course, there are the different sciences that claim that there’s a single universe of immovable laws that are the same for all of us. On the other hand, there are all of us, each with a different view of the universe, each with a different way of understanding things. Impossible for each part of the universe to comprehend the universe as an Indivisible Whole. No mean feat. Simpler, I think, is to appoint yourself god of a chaotic and pocket-sized universe, and to reward and punish the sheep with more than debatable justice. That’s where the trouble begins.
In a way, I’m the perfect target for the ire of a conflicted god: Argentine from a well-to-do family, there I am, in range of his wrath and under his command.
Argentina claims the Malvinas are Argentine. England declares the Falklands are British. My way of looking at Australia is completely different from the way Mike looked at it. I don’t know Australia. For me, Australia is a lost-eyed kangaroo hopping across the ass of the world. For Mike, on the other hand, Australia is a real place full of houses and people who speak an odd-accented English, of easy blondes who go surfing every Sunday before going to mass, of tar-colored marsupial Indians, and family members who’ve been cooking well since the beginning of the century. All of this without going into more abstract and intangible definitions. For Mike, for example, Australia is also failure. If Mike goes home to Australia, he’ll be considered a failure by his whole family of chefs, an awful investment on whom they misspent years of effort and expectations. For me, however, on that more abstract and intangible level, Australia remains a lost-eyed kangaroo hopping across the ass of the world.
The same philosophical principal applies to what has come to be known as the South Atlantic Conflict. For my brother Alejo, for example, this whole war is nothing more than new and irrefutable evidence that he is one of those people to whom frightening things are always happening. If there’s a war, I’ll definitely be sent to fight in it. And if there isn’t, well, someone is going to have to invent a war so they can send me to it, Alejo thinks as he leaves the cinema after seeing a war movie. Reality doesn’t take long to prove him right, and there goes Alejo, whistling quietly, bound for the battlefield, thinking about anything but national sovereignty.
Unlike that of my brother Alejo, the particular universe of Roderick Shastri is not so easy to delimit; it’s not at all simple or transparent. Let’s take the subject of the war and one’s relationship to the war, without going any further.
Roderick Shastri is confused. On the one hand, England is fighting for the somewhat faded laurels of her colonial politics, politics that his parents suffered throughout their servile existences. On the other hand, England has opened all her doors to Roderick Shastri, treating him as one of her beloved children. Facing the confusion of nebulas, nova stars, and aurora borealis that manifest disguised as devastating headaches, Roderick Shastri aims his telescope at the most proximal universes and chooses the easiest option: he decides to hate me with all his soul. In a way, I’m the perfect target for the ire of a conflicted god: Argentine from a well-to-do family, there I am, in range of his wrath and under his command.
We are complicated beings.
When at eight years old I flooded my whole house while attempting to awaken buckets and brooms and the human race, my parents understood that I’d misbehaved. When I tried to explain to them what I’d learned thanks to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the clarity with which all the manifestations of being and their disciplined relationship to higher powers had been presented to me, my parents looked at each other, looked at me, and had me committed for five or six years, I don’t remember exactly, to the Institute. There was a priest there called a spiritual counselor who spoke to us of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, and of Noah and the Flood. It didn’t occur to anyone to put Noah in an Institute, now that I think of it. For the holidays, they sent me home with a special pass, with someone who followed me around everywhere and accompanied me even when, as happens in life, I had to go to the bathroom.
Mickey Mouse learns an important lesson in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. You have to live in your own universe without setting it on a collision course with anybody else’s. Mickey’s universe, for a moment, comes into conflict with that of the Master Sorcerer. Hence the madness of the brooms, hence me flooding my house as a reckless manifesto of warning to the world or, at least, to my family. The intervention of the Master Sorcerer puts the Universal Whole back on track without altering the universe of Mickey, who, once the danger has passed, returns to his mouse world more experienced, and everybody happy, Mr. Stokowski included.
When this doesn’t happen, when individual chaos disguises itself as universal order, that’s when what’s generally known as the trouble begins.
The trouble in this case, as in the majority of cases, is that Roderick Shastri selects his victim too hurriedly. The obvious choices are rarely the correct ones, but, of course, this is only understood much later, after the first error has generated a second and that second error has given way to another. Mickey attempts to stop the first broom with his axe, but the splinters give birth to other brooms, and at that point it’s not easy to tell the dancers to take the music elsewhere.
I believe it is the morning of April 15 when Roderick Shastri finally realizes that he lacks the resources to punish me. His power can’t really touch me because, paradoxically, I’m already in the lowest section of his universe. I’m a black hole and I’m quite content to shut my eyes and clean ovens. What’s more, I’m quite good at cleaning ovens. For Roderick Shastri, there’s no turning back; he has declared war on me in front of his rotters, has condemned me in a thunderous voice from his four-foot-eleven-inch stature.
Yes, perhaps Roderick Shastri’s lack of vision is intrinsically connected to his stature. Shiva couldn’t and didn’t know how to see further. If he’d given the matter even the slightest reflection, he would’ve realized that the worst punishment, the obvious punishment, would’ve been to elevate me to a middle position—chef tournant, for example—so that my coworkers could joyfully destroy me. If you think about it a little, the Old Testament is full of similar situations, where the designs of the Lord are inscrutable, as they should be. But Roderick Shastri is not a mysterious god. And that’s why he chooses a new victim—Mike. The last lyrical chef of Australia, the man in a movie that’s perpetually being filmed, and, what’s more, another son of the colonies. Mike the Australian. The closest thing to my only friend.
It’s then that the abstract and intangible definition of Mike’s Australia enters into conflict with the real definition of Mike’s Australia. The abstract and intangible definition of Mike’s Australia wins. Ten days after the outbreak of hostilities, of all hostilities, Mike returns to the real definition of Mike’s Australia, conveniently embalmed for the long journey home.
Now I’m going to shut my eyes, and, please, give me a couple minutes of your lives so that I can describe Mike’s coffin for you.
The man from the funeral parlor decided that it would be best to seal the coffin in England. In any case, he said, the funeral would be closed casket. Given the circumstances, that would be best. Mike’s coffin is a grand coffin. An Australian flag crosswise over oak, silver handles, serpents biting their own tails with respectful enthusiasm for the fallen in action. Mike’s coffin is loaded onto a British Airways flight. They lift it aboard with a pneumatic crane; I’m sure Mike would approve of all of it: the coffin, the fog at Heathrow, the voice over the loudspeakers, and the hooligans headed to the World Cup, a layover in Madrid. I would’ve liked to have been there. I mean I would’ve liked to accompany him. I remember how that feeling unsettled me a little: it’d been a long time since I’d felt a particular desire to go anywhere. That’s why I thought about everything, down to the last detail, as if I were watching it projected on a cinema screen. The shadow the coffin cast on the asphalt of the runway. Then, the Australian desert, a family of chefs around a hole in the dry dirt, the sound of that stone tied to a rope humming useless in the air, and the imperturbable expression of the Indigenous man who set it to spinning over his head at a respectful distance from the funeral party. The Indigenous man has served the family for years and makes the stone spin with a subtle movement of his weathered hand, sweet tears tracing lines through the ceremonial makeup on his face, and—where did I read that?—then the first shovel of dust to dust falls. A grand coffin for the grand finale of the grand movie of Mike.
The first great idea of my life came to me after watching The Sorcerer’s Apprentice more times than is recommended for a growing boy. Remember: I turned on all the faucets, flooded the house, ruined multiple generations of rugs, and, as all of you already know, discovered the private rhythm the cosmos dances to. The second great idea might not have been as transcendent as the first, but it served to reestablish the order of the Symphonic Whole, eliminating one of the musicians who, because he believed himself a composer, had unleashed an attack on the spirit of the score. I take this opportunity to point out that Leopold Stokowski’s arrangements for the music of Fantasia, whatever the experts say, strike me as excellent, and I can’t help but find inspiration for my little act in the memory of the precise movements of his baton when it came to orchestrating the music that flooded my head following Mike’s suicide. “In the precise gesture resides the secret of the perfection of the Whole,” Roderick Shastri, gastronomic deity, head chef of Savoy Fair, often said.
And it was I who executed that gesture.
Everyone was talking about the show. They say it was great. The shortest TV career in history.
A week after Mike, it became apparent that the English phase of my life was coming to an end. The war, on the other hand, continued unabated, and my mother was dancing on the brink of madness with worrying frenzy; Alejo’s letters from the front demonstrated a total lack of interest in what was happening there, telling only the story of an Argentine soldier obsessed with the idea of surrendering to the English and being taken to England to someday see the Rolling Stones. Because of all of that and faced with the impossibility of my brother returning home, she decided that maybe it would be better if at least I came home. A child is a child, after all.
It was during that time that I found out about the TV show. Mike wasn’t there to tell me about it, but the rotters were talking among the saucepans with louder and more excited voices than usual: a BBC producer had offered Roderick Shastri the opportunity to be featured in his own show. It wasn’t a hard decision. Roderick Shastri was of Indian descent, he was popular, and he moved around the kitchen with surprising grace. Here we come to his theory of the “precise gesture” and the need for the chef to have a perfect relationship with the space that surrounds him: “It’s impossible to cook with class if one is not in harmony with his environment.” For that reason, the Savoy Fair kitchen was designed according to the precepts, indications, and measurements dictated by the stature and needs of the lord and master Roderick Shastri. That’s why all his rotters always bumped their heads on the cupboards and all the pots and pans were dented by the end of their first week of use. In reality, the Savoy Fair kitchen is designed down to the millimeter so that Roderick Shastri feels whatever a medium-tall man feels whenever he cooks.
The show was going to go live from the restaurant. On a Wednesday. On that Tuesday, I brought my Tía Ana’s tools to the restaurant. When Savoy Fair closed, I hid behind the oven. I waited for everyone to leave. I worked all night. When I’d finished, all the fixtures and appliances in the kitchen had been moved a few centimeters from their original position, and the ominous music that’d filled my head since Mike’s death seemed to pause for a few seconds. I waited with eyes shut. Then I felt it return, a crescendo of strings and brass: the final assault and definitive thunderclap announcing the last storm, the music that sets the brooms in motion, the music that sets all the brooms in the universe in motion.
The sorcerer’s apprentice experienced the daunting joy of knowing himself the Master Sorcerer for the first time.
The next week, everyone was talking about the show. They say it was great. The shortest TV career in history. I didn’t watch it, of course; I was making preparations to return to Argentina, and besides, as you know, I’m too sensitive to what I see. But Tía Ana told me all about it.
He started working as our father’s “right hand.” Don’t ask me what that means exactly.
“You should’ve seen your boss. Poor little guy. He was stretching out his arms and couldn’t reach anything. He was setting plates down in thin air. He did these useless little hops trying to open the door to the pantry. A truly sad spectacle. I don’t know why it made me remember the Aston Martin of Lady Eleonora after it drove into the Thames during the change of guard. A terrible thing. The little guy started sobbing in front of the cameras, and they carried him away wrapped in a blanket. He was howling something in Hindi, I think. I have to say he didn’t seem like that bad of a person.”
The next day, with a punctuality that didn’t presage anything good, the new head chef of Savoy Fair took over. His name was Patrick McTennyson Bascombe. He wore his family’s coat of arms on his apron, over his heart, and after enlightening us with the impassioned saga of his always-victorious ancestors, he explained to us benevolently that we should call him “Milord” and that, from that moment onward, we would be his “adorable little pieces of shit.” He was another perfect son of a bitch, and the heartbeat of the universe returned to its normal accelerated rhythm. But it wasn’t my problem.
Nobody in my family came to meet me at the airport. The only person who smiled at me from among all those people was Leticia Feijóo Pearson, whom, as you might suspect, I married practically the next day.
Alejo had returned from the war. He was in one piece and smiled nonstop. He looked perfectly ready to accept the next terrifying thing that his inevitable fate would send his way. For the time being, he started working as our father’s “right hand.” Don’t ask me what that means exactly.
I spent my time shut in my office, reading the perturbing memos that Leticia sent me via my increasingly perturbed secretary. Poor woman, she had one year left before retirement, and my father decided to assign her to me. Sometimes, so she wouldn’t feel too bad, I dictated letters to her to send to Mike in Australia. One letter a week, not much work.
One day, when Leticia had a session with her medium or an emergency consult with her physical therapist, I slipped out of the office. It was an afternoon at the end of September, and I had several hours in front of me. I ate something in a bar downtown, a hamburger that successfully challenged the Theory of Relativity, and ended up going into an empty cinema. The one with that huge screen, the Cinerama.
They were showing Lawrence of Arabia.
I watched it twice in a row. The copy wasn’t in great shape, but I didn’t care.
When I walked out, night had fallen, it was raining harder than in the Bible, and the world seemed to me, suddenly, full of infinite possibilities.