No hi ha al món re més repugnant que un botifler

Tot comença bé per al pastís

Sempre que havia volgut imitar els mestres
Fer llurs formes d’alta pastisseria
Trobava al capdavall que la farina
Era haguda sabotejada.

Tot començava bé per al pastís.

Pas a pas, seguia les instruccions
Barrejava a poc a poc, mes amb prou traça
I com qui diu amb la mà trencada
Els ous, l’oli, les essències…

Mauraves llavors una pasta d’allò més dúctil
Mal·leable, grogueta, lluent, flairosa, greixoseta.

Mes quan calia afegir-hi farina
Car allò que fonyegaves era massa tou, no prou làbil
L’escàndol s’escunçava.

Què és això…! S’esglaiava el sobrecoc.

Car tota mena de brutícia eixia de la bosseta –
Herbotes, palles, pellerofa, bocins de carn podrida
Escarbats de totes menes, vius i morts
Roplegats qui sap per on.

M’han sabotejada la farina
M’han enverinada la farina
Em volen enverinat…
Tractava de dir, mes cada mestre em guaitava
Amb malfiança; no anirem pas
Enlloc, semblava dir.

Cada mestre em guaitava amb fàstic
Cada mestre se’m treia al capdavall
De sobre
Cada mestre em sobreprèn sense contemplacions
Cada mestre, ecs…!

I deixa’m escombrar tot això cap a les escombraries
I deixa’m amagar
Ben amagat, empaitat per sempre més
Pels cucs de la farina
Pels sobrecocs ganyons i molt ofesos
I els cucs enferotgits de la verinosa farina
Traïdorencament adulterada
Pels bares
Llefiscosos
Repents
Tapats enemics.

Whatever’s cooking count me out

I’m such a down on the luck cook – the flour I’m supposed to work with, it just happens that… It just every time happens to be rotten somehow, full of worms and beetles and molds, and whatnot. Not surprising then that I’m never invited to the kitchen.

Yesterday, though, I was at a party of sorts, at an old friend’s, and I was just reading, or rather leafing in mild wonder through one of my own books that he happens still to own – he’s actually got all of my books tidily arranged over one of the upper shelves – an ancient book of mine – gave it to him myself when it appeared decades ago – and then of course I’ve lost most of my books, including those I happened to pen myself as I say too long ago – and, with that, one of those stupid heavily perfumed know-nothing girls of twenty or thirty had come and asked me if I really understood the thing [meaning I suppose the (obscure?) language (Catalonian) of the book,] to which silly remark in passing I pretended to be deaf to, and, after a short while, as I was mumblingly imbibing the old honeys of my deliquescent verses, they came from the kitchen to ask for my help – not in the cooking of the cakes or anything of the kind referring to the confection of the foods, mind you, but requesting my help on the intricate question of the lighting of the furnace, it being an old furnace, and me being old, and my old friend being outside entertaining the fellows chatting at the backyard.

I had already (it seemed) messed up the syrup of the greatly enfeebled granddad. He had asked me, while everyone was employed on attending the littlest of the sisters, a girl of about three or four, afflicted with a deadly incurable fast-killer of a nasty cancer, who (the girl) in the meantime had had a dreadful attack of sorts, and the decrepit nonagenarian, as I say, had asked me to prepare him a thimbleful of his own syrup, rightly diluted. “Rightly diluted,” I remember perfectly that that is what he told me, or I least that is what I understood from his drowning burble.

His opoponax or panacea, his syrupy stuff, that I retrieved from the fridge, happened to be an ugly angry-red gonorrheal goo, stinking of garlic and of a blasphemous mixture of those Indian disgusting spices you find in so-called exotic shops, plus tomato paste and powder of cantharides and so on. The geezer himself I was later told would spend the whole of every weekend preparing his weekly dough. Well I diluted a thimbleful of it with some tap water into a tumbler and brought it to him; he swallowed the sickening sap with a couple of noisy, rather what maybe you would call death-rattling, gulps. He felt much better, he said. But then he shrank farther and crumbled at my feet.

“What did you give him?” All those young fucking ugly malodorous women were shouting at me. “Poor grand!”

It seems my sorry dilution of the hideous conglutinate had done the unpardonable trick of almost doing the old fellah in.

What a klutz with the cooking utensils and what a shambles with the sacrosanct endeavor targeted at feeding the families, and what a scarecrow he makes of the know-how required by the proper care of hungry mankind that we ladies know so well how to provide for – the clueless bumpkin, and what an interloper, and how unmasterly with the sundry cibariously aimed implements – and the crone joking: “No better deterrent than to set their virtual short skirts on fire” – [again the broken jumpy dazzling afterimages of the hateful old woman hissing: “Faldilletes!”] – or else, whatever, some other moronic snot-nosed bladder-puffing litany of that sort – the nagging ladies, the cousins, and the sisters, and the aunts, and the female in-laws, and in fine all the smelly-cunt fauna were recriminating me, an outsider suffered here only by the quaint benevolence of my old friend, the master nonetheless of the palatial abode all that pesky small fry stood with their tails wiggling and their mouths sucking in – like those univalves whose only attraction is their hole – but not the hole of their mouth – the one between their legs rather, the one does all the feeding and fucking and shitting, indeed, but says, as indeed it should, zilch…

Everybody was dying on the side, the littlest girl (poisoned by the inner juices gone degenerate,) the oldest of the guys (poisoned by the outer juices gone treacherously diluted by a blundering terrorist-styled foreign stranger,) while the bulk of the party attendees enjoyed themselves as best they could, unaware of all the macabre goings-on, and the sinister slip-ups and the culinary mishaps, and so on.

Once in the kitchen now, I was immediately told by the same stupid cunt had come to fetch me with so much fuss and urgency that my vital cooperations were no longer needed, that I could go fuck myself now if so I wanted with my gallimaufry rigmarole shitty little Mao-forever Johnson-assassin book which nobody on Earth anyway neither cared to understand nor indeed understood.

The fire on the range had been lit by the young lions, who now were bantering about stuff happening in a world they dominated from their enormous and pointy heights while cooking some muck or other on skillets which whizzed and splotched with burning oil.

One of the master chefs said something disparaging about my team, Barça, which was about to be beaten two-to-one in next meeting with a ferocious London team; Barça, though a much better team on paper, was doomed to be overwhelmed, cowered by the fierceness of the hooligan crowd, according to the pasty-faced sage of the poison-wafting smog-subsumed nether-hellish kitchens.

I noticed that the calendar affixed on the wall just above the corner I had collapsed, my ass splashed like an artichoke on the seat of an old kitchen chair, a Catalonian calendar my friend must have retrieved from one of his recent trips to Barcelona – where he’s had for ages a bunch of inscrutable businesses churning on – the Catalonian calendar on the wall just above my face had, surmounting the days of the month, a long, long, ascending photo of the steps up to the Montjuïc palace.

These are my people, I said to myself, these are my marvelous people. Those that climb those stately stairs. Those I must return to before I die, those know what’s good, what matters, what is all at. Those are my people. My people. Here I must be heading soon, here I’m due, here I belong anew and forever… Before I die. Here’s where the Sun and the beautiful-sounding sounds always sound.

There was on the back of my chair a dirty old kitchen rag. I took the cloth like it were the one that erstwhile covered the sacred Catalonian grail, now stolen away by the consuetudinary armed predators, and with it I dabbed at my soft tears of deep emotion for a world gone suddenly obsolete.

“Are you crying, pops?” One of those reeking youngish good-for-nothing whores feigned to ask.

“It’s the fucking smoke,” I said.