The Eldorado Network (3 page)

On the afternoon of Luis's second day in the white coat, the owner received a semi-important local politician and his wife. For half an hour they tasted samples which Luis poured, holding each bottle in a white napkin and demonstrating a small flourish of pride, while the owner released his limited wine-vocabulary a word at a time, like toy balloons: mature . . . discreet , . . robust . . . challenging . . . brave. . .

He opened a fresh bottle and handed it to Luis.

'Now this is something different,' he said. 'Those others are good wines, excellent wines some of them. But this I have kept apart for several years, awaiting . . .' He leaned forward and watched closely as Luis poured. '. . , awaiting a palate which can appreciate the gift of time.'

Luis stiffened. The politician's wife noticed this, and glanced at him. Luis finished pouring, but omitted the usual small flourish.

They raised their glasses and examined the wine. 'Once in a lifetime,' the owner said. 'Perhaps, if God wills it, twice. Ten years ago, when I was privileged to make this discovery, it was so small and so rare that I made the decision that I must bottle it all myself, with these very hands.'

'No you didn't,' Luis said.

Three heads turned and stared. The owner's eyes were sick with rage. Luis tightened his grip on the bottle and breathed deeply.

'Explain yourself,' invited the politician's wife.

'He didn't bottle this stuff ten years ago,' Luis declared. 'I bottled it last week. There's enough of it downstairs to drown an elephant.'

'Get out,' the owner ordered. 'The boy is feeble-minded," he told them, smiling savagely.

'Two elephants,' Luis said. His heart was galloping, squeezing all the air from his lungs.

'Ignore him, the child is drunk,' the owner said. He wanted to grab Luis but Luis had moved behind a table and the owner was afraid of a humiliating chase. 'He is a halfwit, you see. I took him on as a favour, a halfwit, he says these things, stupid meaningless things.' The owner was sweating like old cheese. 'And when I am not looking he drinks. A drunken halfwit.'

'I am not a child,' Luis said evenly. 'I am fifteen years old.' He pressed his thighs against the edge of the table to stop them trembling.

The politician and his wife looked at each other. 'Well, my dear,' he said. 'Shall we taste the wine?' They tasted the wine and gazed past each other, lips pursed. The owner stood with his fingers curled and straining at his cuffs. His jaw muscles flickered with tension, and Luis could hear his teeth make a faint squeak. Luis began to be afraid.

At last the politician swallowed, and looked into his glass. His wife swallowed, and he glanced sideways at her.

'The boy is wrong,' she said quietly. 'This is not fit even for elephants.'

They put their glasses on the table in front of Luis, and she gave him just the beginnings of a smile. They went out, escorted by the owner, who was thunderous with silence. As he closed the door behind them he turned and snatched up a walking-cane. 'You stinking little bastard streak of whore's-piss," he whispered in case the politician and his wife heard. 'I'm going to cut your ass into strips for that!'

Luis showed him four bottles of the firm's irreplaceable five-star brandy, each bottle individually numbered, dated and signed by a monk who was long since dead. He held two bottles in each hand, like Indian clubs. 'You come near me and I'll smash them all,' he said.

'I'll kill you!' the owner hissed. He realised that the politician and wife were out of earshot. 'I'll kick your filthy guts out!' he roared.

'You were going to do that anyway,' Luis said. His arms were starting to ache. The owner took a sudden step forward and Luis twitched, so that the bottles clinked. The owner froze.

I want a taxi,' Luis said. 'Get it outside the front door with the engine running. When I'm inside it, you can have these back.'

The owner cursed and stamped about the room, while Louis braced himself and prayed that his fingers would not lose their grip. Eventually the man stormed out and shouted furiously for a taxi. Luis followed, cautiously, and eased himself into the back seat, never taking his eye off the owner. 'When I say go,' he told the driver, 'please drive like hell.' He thrust the bottles out of the window and into the owner's arms. 'Go!' he shouted. The taxi leaped forward with a scream of wheelspin, flinging Luis back against the cushions. The last he saw of the owner was a contorted figure desperately failing to stop one bottle slipping through his arms and smashing on the cobblestones.

Luis had to interrupt his mother's piano-practice in order to borrow the taxi-fare. She wasn't interested in hearing about his experience and she was annoyed at the interruption. She was also very annoyed at Chopin, who was resisting her with more than his usual stubbornness. To punish them both, she made Luis stand beside her and beat time. He wasn't much good at beating time, so she soon had the satisfaction of correcting him. That left only Chopin to be overcome, and Senora Cabrillo was fairly confident that one day she would beat him too. She had the stamina, and Chopin wasn't getting any younger.

The following week Luis's father was transferred to Valencia, where Luis got a job as a waiter and kept it for almost a month.

He quite enjoyed being a waiter, and he learned a lot, especially from serving tourists.

'They say they want coffee,' he complained to Jose-Carlos, the head waiter, on his third day. 'I just gave them their soup and already they want coffee!'

Jose-Carlos identified the table. 'Americans,' he said approvingly. 'Give them coffee now. Give them what they want. They ask for coffee, water, ketchup, ice-cream, more coffee, hot rolls, cold rolls, stale rolls, cheese before beef, fruit before fish, soup with jam  -- anything, as long as we have got it, you give it to them. Make 'em happy.'

'Yes, but coffee on top of soup ..." Luis shook his head.

'Listen: don't tell people what they like. 'Jose-Carlos gave him a shove. 'You give them what they want and they'll give you what you want.'

The Americans got ample coffee and Luis got a good tip. Thereafter his whole attitude changed, and nothing was impossible. He learned to anticipate: hungry patrons need food at once, if it's only bread and olives; when the steak is tough make sure the knives are sharp; to the man who pays the bill goes the tastiest portion. And so on.

Towards the end, Luis discovered a harmless little ruse which boosted his tips appreciably. He had just presented a bill and he was halfway back to the kitchen when he realised he'd overcharged them. Included an order of mushrooms which got cancelled. Tiny mistake. For a second he hesitated, looking back at the table where a large, bald man was laughing at somebody else's joke while he spread banknotes over the bill, Luis knew what to do: say nothing,- cross out mushrooms and pocket the difference. That's what anybody else would do. So he went back and corrected the bill. At first the bald man was irritated; he thought Luis had forgotten something and was now adding it on. Then he was pleased  -- more pleased than the few pesetas' saving was worth. In the end most of it went to swell Luis's tip.

After that Luis regularly forgot to cancel the mushrooms.

Jose-Carlos observed how frequently Luis had to return to his tables and adjust the bill, and he commented on it. 'I try to make people happy,' Luis said.

'I don't mind that,' Jose-Carlos told him. 'Just make it eggs mayonnaise once in a while.'

It was neither mushrooms nor egg mayonnaise that got Luis sacked, however, but cherry ice-cream.

He had begun to make something of a personal crusade out of giving customers exactly what they wanted. Coffee between courses was too easy; he nagged the kitchen into stocking hot mustard for the English, pumpernickel for the Germans, escargots for the French. Most of these extras went to waste; too few foreigners used the restaurant. Luis ignored this. Just serving people from the menu was boring; he wanted to surprise them, to bring them the impossible.

One evening the kitchen was going full blast  -- the chef cooking with one hand and slicing with the other, worrying over what his girlfriend might be doing at that moment, sweat stinging his eyes -- when Luis breezed in.

'My friend the rich American wants cherry ice-cream,' he announced.

'He's out of luck,' the chef growled. He began cooking an omelette while he sautéed some kidneys and tried to work out where the fish soup had gone wrong.

'Come on, chef, I promised him,' Luis urged. 'He's home-sick, he said he bet we didn't have cherry ice-cream.'

'He's right. Hot plates\' the chef bawled.

Luis stood and stared. He hated to go back to the American and lose face. On the other hand the chef was obviously choosing to be completely unhelpful. He saw him wince as he slid the omelette onto a plate which was so hot it made the food sizzle.

'You've got cherries, haven't you?' Luis asked.

'Yes.' Kidneys came off, veal went on, another waiter claimed the omelette.

'And you've got ice-cream.'

The chef nodded and basted a chicken.

'Well then, make me some cherry ice-cream.'

'Sweetbreads, the chef shouted. 'Piss off,' he told Luis evenly.

Still Luis hesitated. He had thought the chef liked him, responded to his charm, was amused by his eccentric demands. How to overcome this new indifference? Be even more outrageous? 'What's the problem?' he asked, half-grinning. 'Even a tenth-rate dump like this can afford a spare mixing-bowl, can't it?'

For an instant the chef was motionless, frozen in time. Then he turned with the tray of sweetbreads in his hands and hurled it at Luis. Lumps of bleeding meat rained against his face and splattered the kitchen. The tray just missed his right ear and smashed into a stack of serving-dishes. Luis gaped in astonishment while cold blood ran from his chin to his collar. 'Piss off\' the chef howled, and flung a chopping-block at him. Luis fended it off with his hands and the bruising pain aroused him. He backed away, dodging a small loaf, a half-cabbage, a coffee-pot, a ladle, not dodging a nearly-full tin of English mustard. The uproar brought the proprietor at a run. He hustled Luis out by a back door and kicked him  -- literally kicked him  -- into the street. 'Imbecile!' he shouted. 'Maniac! Cretin!'

'But you don't know what happened,' Luis protested. An old man, picking through a bin of kitchen waste, paused to listen.

'You have enraged my chef! What else is there to know?' The door slammed. Luis stood trembling with shock, pain, anger, shame.

'You shouldn't have done that,' the old man reproached. 'Good chef, he is.' He held up the retrains of half a roast chicken. 'Have a taste of this, friend Exquisite flavour. Out of this world.'

This time Luis said nothing to his parents. It was the beginning of his true growing-up: from now on he would make his own decisions without informing or consulting anyone. Luis had made the great adolescent discovery -- not only do parents not know everything: if you don't tell them, they never get a chance to find out.

During the next year he had seventeen jobs and was fired from all except three, which he quit.

He walked the streets, selling peanuts. Fired because he got into a fight with a rival peanut-vendor and lost. Worked as a window-cleaner for a few days until the paralysing boredom made him quit. Sacked for incompetence or insubordination as a stable-lad, bookshop assistant, roadmender, bellhop and delivery boy. Got a job gutting fish and rapidly came to hate the smell so much that he quit and went to work as a florist's assistant, until one day a rich and elderly customer came in and ordered a dozen red roses for her dog.

'When did he die?' Luis asked as he wrapped them.

'He isn't dead,' the customer said stiffly. 'These flowers are for his birthday.'

'His birthday? Luis stopped wrapping. 'Flowers don't mean a thing to dogs, you know, madam. Not a thing.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Dogs are colour-blind. That's a scientific fact. And they can hardly smell flowers at all. Food, yes. Roses . . . Well, you might as well give him a photograph. Or a book,'

'Young man, you are being extremely impertinent.'

'Madam, I'm only telling you the truth. I mean, if you want red roses because you like red roses, that's different, that's understandable, take these. But if all you want is to make your animal happy I can think of many better ways: nice juicy bones, scraps, perhaps hot gravy -- '

'All right, all right, Cabrillo . . .' The florist had arrived, flushed and flurried. 'I'll take care of this.' He thrust Luis into the back room. Luis didn't wait to be told; he knew by now what that grating tone of voice meant. He moved on and got a dreadful job clearing tables in a sleazy hotel

dining-room, quit after three days and was hired as a room service. waiter by a much grander hotel. There, at the age of slightly more than sixteen, he lost his virginity.

The event took place in an expensive suite on the fourth floor. Breakfast had been ordered. Luis took up the tray and found a youngish woman, still in bed. She was astonishingly beautiful, like the glossy stills of filmstars he'd seen displayed outside cinemas: lustrous red hair tumbling around a fresh, provocative face; brilliant eyes; shining lips; dazzling teeth. She told him, huskily, to put the tray on a bedside table, and as he walked across the room he felt enormously elated, as"if a vast audience of tens of thousands was watching him.

'Can you stay for a little while?' she asked, turning towards him.

'Yes, of course.' Luis noticed that her shoulders were bare, and his heart began to hurt his ribs. 'Do you want me to ... Do you need something ...'

She smiled so happily that he found himself instinctively smiling back.

'Oh, I think so,' she said. Her long, slender naked arm came out and tugged at his trousers, 'I want you to take off those silly clothes.'

His fingers trembled and stumbled. The waiter's uniform was disapproving and awkward. A button sprang off the jacket. A shoelace locked itself in a knot. Sunlight flooded the room, and street-sounds reached him distantly and harmlessly, as if from another world. Luis, trying to step out of his underpants, got his left foot caught and had to hop strenuously to save himself from falling over.