Catalonia Revisited

(NOTE: Two swear words, but no actual swearing)

CATALONIA REVISITED

Outside, the street lights came on and she saw a young woman wrap a cardigan around her shoulders. A gull called out. Nerys was imbibing atmosphere, trying to consign things to long term memory. Inside, the big welcoming wooden table was plenty big for three. It was circular too, the best shape for a table.

There was a half drunk bottle of red wine on it and when Ramon had finished replenishing their glasses it was almost empty. A waiter was passing. Ramon lifted the bottle a smidgeon towards him. Otro mas, he said.

They were to be the only words of Spanish spoken that night. Ramon and Lupe never spoke that tongue at home but they could hardly expect Nerys to understand Catalan. So they all got by with French. Nerys remembered how she’d never understood the language so well as she had on previous times with them. Their French was certainly better than hers but they were still foreigners with it. Once upon a time they had made a habit of driving through the night to Perpignan just to see a movie that was banned in Spain.

It had all been so different then. Her reveries were interrupted by the arrival of the food. A huge circular skillet perfect for the table. A zarzuela of hake and swordfish and mussels. It swam in delicious seafood jus. A fresh basket of bread was brought to replace the one consumed with the olives. And a side dish of samphire completed the feast.

It was delicious, one of the best meals Nerys could remember- up there with Chris’s curry made with a whole chicken, rice and yoghurt, and that crab meal they had enjoyed on Jersey. That crab soup! It was not of course just the food she was remembering. Ramon seemed to sense where she was going. The start of the main course was not the time to follow her in that particular memory-journey.

“Spain has changed so much”, he said.

It had indeed. The first time they’d met and sat at a Ramblas pavement bar Barcelona had still been tense despite its efforts to be a modern cultured European city, a second city like Munich or Milan. But when the police sirens sounded people still stopped talking and tensed and looked around. The hated Franco was still in power. The Madrilenos seemed to prevail everywhere. Nerys remembered fiery Lupe promising to open a big bottle of champagne when he died- her own father was in exile in Paris. Ramon, quieter much and less political, had said with a smile

“Nerys, when the next Spanish Civil War breaks out I’ll be the first person across the border into France.”

Nerys knew what he was doing and she was grateful to him. But she had wanted to do this, to trek across Europe meeting up with Chris’s old friends. She was staying in hotels as she travelled, partly because they had been his friends but partly also and maybe more so she wanted to test her resilience, to see how she could manage on her own. And in that she felt she had failed. Her own company hung heavily on her and she realised she could not yet travel on her own for more than two days, or two nights away.

She valiantly put away those thoughts as she took a forkful of delicious hake falling away from the bone and into the jus which she could see now had plenty of butter within it. There were herbs there too, tarragon she reckoned and something else she could not quite identify. She took a sip of the wine and remembered that Ramon and Lupe seemed to drink red with virtually everything.

Chris and Lupe had always had fun together- half banter, half flirt. She and Ramon used to look at each other with half-smiles on their faces. They knew they were the rocks that their scattier halves would always come home to. Chris had met Lupe in London one long-ago summer. Ramon had only came over from Barcelona a week or two later. Some spark had been lit but Nerys never felt the need to dig any deeper.

And all that was so long ago, Now she was just relaxing, or trying to. Trying to forget, and yet wanting to remember at the same time. Aren’t we crazy creatures she thought to herself.

“Why are you smiling?” asked Lupe, with a smile.

“Why not?”, Nerys replied. “This is all so nice.”

People used to say to her that nice was a weak word to describe something good. Nerys never saw it like that. Nice is a strong word, she said to herself. But of course she was not saying nice. She was saying “bon”. She would have liked to have shared her thoughts, but she could not make that work across three languages. Never mind.

They were finishing the main dish. So delicious. All that fish and the mussels. The crisp cut bread. The samphire.

“Samphire’s such a lovely vegetable”, said Nerys. “It grows all around Britain’s shores yet most Brits have never tasted it, never even heard of it.”

She remembered the last time she had asked for it in Morrison’s. The fellow had thought she had said “sunflower” and when she spelled it out he too had never heard of it. And he was working on the vegetable counter!

“I shall try not to make jokes about British food”, smiled Ramon.

“I think it’s getting slowly better”, said Lupe.

“Maybe”, agreed Nerys “But it’s a mishmash. It borrows from everywhere. At the moment it’s from South East Asia- Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam. There isn’t much of an indigenous tradition. And what there is is getting lost. Here in the centre of a huge city there are proper Spanish…

“Catalan”, corrected Lupe.

“Sorry”, smiled Nerys “Proper indigenous restaurants selling local fish, local ham, local…

And the waiter had come back with a cheese board, and the middle was a cheese Nerys was unfamiliar with.

“Manchego”, smiled Ramon “Don Quixote’s cheese”.

“I’ve never read it”, confessed Nerys.

“Neither have I” replied Lupe.

“Tut tut,” said Ramon

They cut slices of cheese and helped themselves to more bread. They sipped their wine.

“How are you really, Nerys?” said Lupe softly.

“It’s difficult. The children have been magnificent.”

“Larger than life”, mused Ramon.

“Not sure”, said Nerys. “He’d wanted to be an actor. He performed a lot.”

“Let’s all say one thing about Chris we’ll particularly remember”, said Ramon

Lupe frowned.

“No, it’s all right”, said Nerys. “Let’s do that. You two start.”

“He read a lot”, said Ramon. If you arranged to meet him somewhere he was always reading a book when you arrived.”

“He swore a lot”, said Lupe. “He was forever saying “fuck” and “cunt”.

Nerys nodded and laughed. Both actions were vigorous. Then she spoke.

“He was the kindest of men. To me, to his children, to his friends. He would always help. He was”, the briefest of pauses, “Beautiful”.

The restaurant was closing. Lights were going out. Nerys could hardly see Ramon and Lupe anymore. It was as if they were not there. And she would probably never come this way again. She felt alone, alone with memories. Sad yes, but oh so sweet.