O PASTEL

Pastéis e fotografia, J.G.

Lisboa.

“Sabe o que é um pastel de bacalhau? Um pastel de bacalhau é um frito, com a forma duma ameixa, de cor ocre com manchas escuras e superfície irregular como as costas dum animal abespinhado. O interior amarelo com pintinhas verdes tanto pode ser uma massa seca, com uma ocasional espinha de grandes dimensões, como pode ser macia e ter mesmo sabor a bacalhau. Por isso é melhor conhecer o sítio onde se vai comer o pastel. Os portugueses não vendem os pastéis de bacalhau nas padarias, como na sua terra se faz com o burek, vendem-nos nos sítios em que também se bebe. Por isso é que você não vê pessoas a andarem na rua comendo pastéis de bacalhau, nem a entrarem num café com um saco de papel com pastéis de bacalhau e pedirem uma taça de vinho branco.”

O meu amigo olha-me com a atenção dividida entre as minhas palavras e os pastéis que vêm a caminho.
Perfilado em frente a um mar encapelado de azulejos azuis e amarelos, o empregado que trouxera os pastéis, mexendo-se devagar mas com eficácia, olha para além de nós com uma atenção silenciosa.
O meu amigo repara com estranheza nos bancos. São assentos de madeira altos de tampo quadrado e estão montados em volta da barra para pôr os pés, não podendo assim mexer-se senão de lado e apenas um pouco para trás e para diante.

“Nunca vi uns bancos assim”, diz-me ele, “nem penso que alguém queira agarrar num banco tão pesado e fugir com ele pela porta fora.”
Explico-lhe que antigamente, por estes lados, tinham o curioso hábito, quando bebiam um copo a mais, de mandar com os bancos à cabeça uns dos outros.
Olha-me com incredulidade. “Em tempos”, digo-lhe eu para arrumar de vez as suas dúvidas, “sobretudo junto ao rio e nos bairros que sobem até ao Castelo, era hábito baptizarem os estrangeiros desse modo”.
Ele entrega-se ao pastel, para amenizar o horror.

Estamos nisto, quando estala uma gritaria lá fora. Ao fundo, a rua está cheia de gente. Os gritos são de socorro. Com tanta gente na rua, porque não socorrem o desgraçado?
Pedimos vinho tinto e ele mira já, guloso, o último pastel que está na montra.

Os gritos aproximam-se, e imagino que tenham palavras escondidas, mas não se consegue perceber quais. Vamos até à porta. Um homem grande com uma grande cabeleira amarrada em tufo na nuca como um polvo, pega pela manga de outro homem, que se agarra ao chão e se faz de peso-morto, enquanto grita e esperneia como uma criança.
O polvo está a gritar para um telemóvel, com uma voz gemida “onde é que vocês estão? Agarrei o Moçambique! Onde é que vocês estão?”
Mentira, não agarrou nada, o Moçambique, que se vê logo ser malandro como um alho, escapa-se e agarra num grande cubo de basalto. Mas a ameaça que leva na mão tarda em atingir uma altura digna.
O outro continua a ser o único dos dois a manter o estado de histeria, “Onde é que vocês estão?”

Um carro da polícia vem da rua de cima e tapa a saída ao Moçambique, que abre os braços como que para receber um amigo ausente há muito, fazendo ao mesmo tempo desaparecer a pedra que se diria nunca ter estado nas suas mãos, sequer arrumada estrategicamente a um canto do passeio, tal como outros cubos de basalto espalhados pelo centro da cidade. O Moçambique aproxima-se assim para o emocionante encontro, tira o blusão, finge despir a camisa em gestos trapalhões e entrega-se de braços e pernas abertas contra o carro, como num filme americano.
Viro-me para o sítio onde deveria estar o homem com a cabeça de polvo, mas este entretanto desapareceu como uma brisa.

Voltamos para dentro. Já não há pastel de bacalhau na montra. Um tipo de boné, ao fundo do balcão, está a comê-lo. Então, o meu companheiro agarra no assento do banco e sacode-o. Este abana um pouco para um lado, um pouco para outro, pouco firme.

C

WAX

Another old story from Carmen’s café, this time during the Holy Week in Andalucia, when penitents in hooded suits fill the streets, carrying images of saints, incense burners and tapers.

As every year, during the processions, Little Tartesus seemed to lose control of his nerves. His fellow penitents in the cofradia, or brotherhood, used to think he had too many glasses of cheap wine over only a meager ration of conchas finas. But that year things were not so easy.

Big Balboa made up that Tartesus was high on something more sinful than just bad wine. Of course nobody believed him, and also everybody knew that Big Balboa had a particular hatred for Little Tartesus since his sister Esmeraldita, also known as La Torre, humiliated Balboa in public one Friday night in Plaza de la Merced, which thing in itself is not astonishing, due to the terrible reputation of La Torre, but that left Big Balboa prisoner of a long-living rage. This year Big Balboa took the trouble of whispering to Little Tartesus that he knew his secret, in the beginning of the procession, thus increasing the nervousness of the man, already afflicted by the fear of losing control as usual.

What Little Tartesus would confess to nobody, not even to the priest, was that he actually hallucinated in such occasions.
Images of the procession would melt inside his hood with sounds and scents from another place and time, and Tartesus would feel he was digging for silver. He dug, and dug, and dug, his hands and feet filled with earth under his broken nails. He would also be very conscious of the smell of the wax. He could not afford wax for himself, even if he dug his entire life. He would get dizzy from the effort and the heat.
The strangest thing would be that Balboa, or someone looking very much like him, was also there, not whispering into his ear unpleasant threats, but watching from a distance, his hands on his hips, the arms full of silver. A mixture of the smell of the dried sweat and the earth of the digging days, and the wax of the burning tapers, would impregnate the cloth over his head and make him feel tired but strong, made him move both with and without his body, both on and above the ground.

When Carmen told me that Big Balboa was found away from the procession in Arco de la Cabeza, seated on the floor, yellow as wax and shrunk inside his gown, the look fixed in a place only him could see, I thought immediately of Little Tartesus, his fear of Balboa and his hallucinated walk.

But people kept all the time an eye on Tartesus, and it was impossible not to notice him walking as if he was floating inside his robes. Only Balboa disappeared from the procession, nobody knows when.
“It was as if he was dropped there by a demon or an angel,” Carmen told me, “or a helicopter.”
I told Carmen the story I was imagining about Little Tartesus. I was curious how my theory would fit in the rumors about a terrible sin, a malediction, and things of the sort, where the name of La Torre was whispered frequently. She shook her head slowly.
“There’s nothing wrong with Tartesus, I’ve been telling it to everybody. He’s just allergic to wax.”

C

THE CHINESE MASTER SPY, CHAPTER 1 - RAKIA FOR THE GHOST

The Chinese Master Spy was published as a weekly webcomic on his own blog between February 7 2008 and August 28 2008. Here are some pages.

MEDITERRANEAN HEAT

Last year Carmen showed me the place where Paco was stabbed in the back in a deadly embrace with his wife Remedios, shortly after my last visit, some years before. The place is a strange and isolated one, a large mole away from the beach and the restaurants, although in plain view of them.
That day, long ago, there were only a few fishermen, Paco included, on the side of the mole facing the thin strand lined with tall buildings and palm trees, and a lonely passerby dwarfed by the huge platform moored at the other end.

“She had more than she could bear,” said Carmen, cleaning the counter with slow movements, a little here, a little there. I wondered if she ever had the intention of cleaning anything at all. Finally she leaned with her arms and her large breasts dressed in red against the counter and moved her lips almost imperceptibly. “There is so much violence,” she said. She went back to the cleaning, this time caressing the coffee machine. For a moment I was left alone with my glass of wine. I looked at the large room of the café, empty of costumers at that hour. Big tables for six or seven people each, with the corresponding chairs in wood and laminated plastic, stood close to the big windows. All those things where there even before Carmen was born.

On the other side of the street was the port and, behind its buildings, the mole. The light outside, usually very bright, was covered with a thin layer of yellow dust blown by a strong and warm wind. The mountains on the background enclosed the place against the sea. The sea was calm. Compared with the usual aspect of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean looked like a big, unnatural swimming pool. There was something in the air that tickled my nerves. I knew the feeling. Even when being careful enough to avoid the omnipresent houses of wine, tapas and seafood, it was difficult to feel sober.

“Do you remember,” said Carmen softly, “last time you were here, you used to make,” she breathed, “you know,” she breathed again, “that bad taste joke, saying a woman smashed in the ground when you were passing by?”
Yes, I could remember that, in the months before Remedios and Paco danced their relationship away, several tragic incidents took place, always involving domestic violence or divorced couples.
“I remember that a man tried to put fire to the apartment of his mother-in-law,” I said, “thinking that with a bit of luck he could burn both her and his wife, but he was so clumsy that the flames spread instead by the stairs.” I sort of laughed trying to spice the bad taste in the joke, “and there was another one,” I started counting by the fingers, “that was more practical and ran over his ex-wife with his car several times.”

I held up my counting and looked sideways to Carmen. She still did not appreciate the joke.
“But the preferred tactic of most of them was just to throw the wife by the window.”
She stood there, leaning with her arms and breasts against the counter.
“Paco was one of those?” I asked carefully, losing any hope of redemption.
“He used to beat her,” Carmen said, looking at me as if she was reading something in the buttons of my shirt, “but I don’t know what she was doing there, in the mole. She used his fishing knife, an old kitchen knife, but very sharp…”
She left the rest of the story that was building up on her head suspended, and went back to the coffee machine.

I looked through the window and imagined that, in the bottom of those waters divided in two shades of blue crossed by the silver band of the sun, there must lie the remains not only of innumerable ships sunken in fights between Christians, between Muslims, between Muslims and Christians, between Muslims and Normans, between Turks and Spanish, between Spanish and Algerians, pirates and Venetians, Turks and Venetians, Venetians and Genoese, among pirates, against pirates, between English, Spanish, French, Italians and Turks, but also all the ones lost in battles against the sea itself and the more recent but outdated sunken ordnance, and the remains of the tones of cocaine consumed in the south of Europe, mixed with a growing quantity of industrial waste. So many things! And still has fish.

C

THE DEATH OF A SLUG

Coming home one day, I found that a slug had managed to slip inside a sloppily installed wall socket and had the only quick thrill of its life when head and tail connected both poles.

I could only identify the animal by a tiny piece of skin lodged in a corner, all the rest being a sort of yellow foam spread all over. I imagine most of their body is water.

The same must happen with snails. If you want to eat snails, you have a problem in killing them. The animal is all foot, and you can’t kill an animal by just twisting its foot. You can’t electrocute them, I saw the result and it didn’t look edible. Freezing seems the only practical solution to kill a snail without damaging the meal. But there was a time when, for doing that, you had to take the animals to the next glacier and back, in time for lunch. Besides, the animal must be out of the shell when ready for eating and I suspect the cold will send him inside forever.

So, usually people just cook them alive, after a complicate ritual that involves, among other things, cleaning it from the mucus. Stories and tricks abound on how to do this. I don’t advise you to wash them the day they were caught, I saw once a friend of my mine doing it and it was not nice to look at his face when the job was done. Usually they are hanged in nets for several days and especially nights, until they rubbed themselves against each other enough to loose the major part of the mucus.

They can be kept for a while in recipients covered with nets or surrounded with salt. Snails avoid the salt but some are courageous enough to brave it.

There is a tradition that snails are good for lung diseases, but for that you have to eat the animal alive.

C

PIRI-PIRI

Every time I find myself in a new place the first thing I prepare is my piri-piri sauce.

“Too much piri-piri is bad for your health,” the doctor says.

“But they are after me. They want to shoot me in the back.”

“Too much of it makes you paranoid, is bad for your blood pressure and affects your sexual performance. Doesn’t that frighten you?”

“I told you, I’m a sailor on the run.”

“Anyway, tell me how you do it.”

“With little dried red chili peppers, oil and time. The longer it stays and the uglier it looks the better. I may add some salt to speed up the process. Some people use whisky or gin, some people a lot of different spices, garlic or ginger, and also vinegar or lemon juice. Not me. I think the place of alcohol, spices and fancy oils is somewhere else. Whenever I can I use olive oil. If I’m in a hurry I just fry some chilies and use the oil.”

“Sounds simple.”

“Yes. And while you fry it, people around you cry.”

C

ATUM

Atum means tuna in Portuguese. My friends and almost everybody I know call me Costa do Atum. With time it became my full name. I tell you the story.

One day, when I was a young sailor, some friends from Cabo Verde presented me with a tuna. Not a slice of tuna, not a big can of tuna, but an entire tuna. Back home, I didn’t know what to do with the animal.

First of all, I thought about making steaks of tuna. Nothing is as delicious as a good steak of tuna. If you know how to make a steak, you know how to make a steak of tuna, I have always been told.

I was not much of a cook by then, and even cooking rice involved an intricate alchemic process for me. So, I left the tuna in the coolest place I could find at home, and went looking for recipes.

From an old cookbook I learned that I could make it either with butter or olive oil, or even both. In the olive oil version I had to let the thin slices of tuna during at least three hours in a marinade of vinegar, white wine, parsley, laurel, garlic and paprika. I noticed they forgot to mention salt, and I also wondered what I should do during those three hours. Then I would have to dry them with a cloth, fry them in olive oil and join the marinade mixed with flour.

By that time I was starting to get nervous. I was young and all of this seemed too much trouble for a steak. When I read that I should serve it with a salad of avocado pear, I gave up. I jumped to the next recipe.

The next one looked more interesting. It mentioned thick slices of tuna and that appealed to me. And it also had onion and pepper, and they did not forget the salt. I should fry the steaks in butter and olive oil, on an earthen frying pan, with all of that and garlic. They did not say how much garlic, I thought an entire bulb would suffice, skin and all, because peeling garlic is a nuisance. By that time I did not know how to take the skin out in just three firm movements. I will tell you some other time.

The detail of using both butter and olive oil fascinated me. I wondered if I should also use lard.
But the best part of it came in the end. It should be served in the frying pan with chips. Although I noticed there were other receipts worth studying, I could not concentrate in anything else than on the steaks and the chips swimming in bubbling fat. I ran back home.

The tuna was gone.

I asked Idalina if she had seen a tuna walking by, or somebody carrying one.

“Idalina,” I asked her, “have you seen my tuna?”

Idalina lived, and still lives, up the street in an old house. The house looks as old as ever, except that now it has plastic window frames. By then, she was married with a distant cousin of mine embarked in the codfish fleet. She is much older by now, she is a widow and she did not give up the idea she will marry again, this time with me. But I like mysterious women, and Idalina is an old acquaintance. Not that she lost her charms with time.

“No,” she retorted gaily from the patio, “but if he belongs to your family I’m sure you won’t be able to keep him at home for a long time.”

I went down to the river bank and looked everywhere. There were enough patios and dark alleys to keep me busy searching for quite a while. Nobody had seen a tuna. I searched in the market, and then I searched in the tascas.
Tascas were small dark places where you could drink wine and eat fried sardines, snails, frog legs, and all those delicious things. Most of them are now expensive seafood restaurants.

“Hey, Costa,” someone called me from inside one of them, “come here and look at this!”

And there he was, in the darkest area of that dark place, the area where you could sit and drink with your friends without being bothered by the world outside, discreetly hidden from curious people, creditors, priests or policemen. My tuna was sitting with a group of my own friends, and they were drinking red wine by small glasses, thick and turned yellow by use.

For a certain time the tuna proved to be a good company but, you know, tunas cannot stop in one place, because then they die. So, one day he vanished for good.

And this is also the reason you are not going to hear any more recipes of tuna from me.

C

THE JUNGLE GOES TO ROVINJ

A short notice, this weekend we go to Rovinj/Rovigno, to the annual art fair. I bring with me some pen-and-ink caricatures about my impressions from Croatia and Nina brings a few recent acrylics. Nina’s work is now on http://cat-on-the-beach.blogspot.com.

KIKI IN THE CANAL

Where Kiki lives houses are small and grow slowly, and most of them are not even meant to be finished. Not far away from her world there is a canal and two ominous long smoking things.

Kiki does not remember being invited, but the smell of the neighbour’s ham was in itself an invitation. Kiki jumped to embrace the ham that was hanging in the neighbour’s larder but, while Kiki is usually very discreet when falling, she was betrayed by the ungraceful ham.

Next thing she recalls is being outside the larder, running in the direction of the canal, the neighbour somewhere behind her.

The sight of the huge smoking things coming closer.

The threatening grunts.

The dry noise, the blow, the jump in the water.

Kiki is now paralyzed from the hind quarters. “Maybe next time”, says her owner, “it will be my son or my husband…”

WATCH YOUR HEAD

When driving

in Zagreb

please use

your head.

Hard lines.

Hard line.

Walking in the pleistocene. The pleistocene is part of the cenozoic era.

This is the pond.