Free Southern Seas by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

grandfather.’
    ‘Nature teaches us everything. On the one hand, just look around you here. Shit. Nothing but shit. If we knew what we were breathing! Sometimes I have to drive up to Tibidabo. And from Vallvidrera—Jesus!—you can see all the shit floating over the city.’
    ‘I live in Vallvidrera.’
    ‘Lucky you.’
    The taxi dropped him on a street in Tres Torres, an old residential district whose family houses had been pulled down to make way for bright, low-rise blocks, nicely set back from the pavement to allow a growth of dwarf cypresses, myrtles, a well-protected banana tree, palms and oleanders. An entrance hall, which would not have disgraced the New York Sheraton, served as a vast backdrop for the bustling of a musical-comedy porter, who registered the name Marquess of Munt with more respect than Carvalho had shown in uttering it. He opened the door to the lift and got in with Carvalho. As they were going up, he murmured nothing more than: ‘The Marquess is expecting you.’ The lift passed the doors of all four tenants of the four-storey building. Carvalho was shown into a reception room, thirty metres square, decorated in a Japanese style that predated
Madame Butterfly
.
    A mulatto servant dressed in white and pink took charge of the detective and led him into a bizarre stage-setting. A vast space of eighty square metres, carpeted white throughout. The only furniture was a piano and, at the far end, designer seating fastened to floor and wall. On the white carpet, the only foreign body was a metal cone which tapered up from the floor to an ultra-fine point, in an apparently vain attempt to reach the ceiling. The Marquess of Munt was relaxing on a sofa, with a perfectly composed air of gravity. Seventy years of snobbish living were condensed in the thin frame of a fair-skinned, smartly dressed old man, with eyes like shining slots in which a pair of malignant pupils danced and darted. The lilac veins in his lightly made-up face had been raised like scratch marks by the wine that was keeping cool in the ice bucket. He held a glass in his right hand, and a copy of Michel Guérard’s
Cuisine Minceur
in the left. The book beckoned to Carvalho to sit down on any of the lumps that emerged from the milky landscape.
    ‘Will you eat with me, Señor Carvalho? My partner, Señor Planas, tells me that you breakfast on fried eggs and chorizo.’
    ‘I said that to beat off his dietary assaults.’
    ‘Planas has never learnt the pleasure of eating. It has to be learnt around the age of thirty. That’s when human beings cease to be imbeciles—and in return, they have to pay the price of growing old. This afternoon, I’ve decided to have some morteruelo and chablis. Do you know what morteruelo is?’
    ‘It’s a kind of pâté from Castille.’
    ‘From Cuenca, to be precise. A most striking pâté. Made of hare, pork shoulder, chicken, pig’s liver, walnuts, cloves, cinnamon and caraway. Caraway! A fine word for an excellent flavour!’
    The mulatto had the scent of a homosexual stud—a solid, fragrant, woodish kind of smell. He placed before Carvalho a tray with a tall, clear, shapely quartz crystal glass on it.
    ‘You will doubtless agree with me that it is quite unspeakably bad taste to drink white wine from green glasses. I’m against thedeath penalty except in cases of nauseating bad taste. How can people deny wine the right to be seen? Wine must be seen and smelt before it can be tasted. It requires transparent crystal, as transparent as possible. It was some vulgar French
maître
who started the fad for green glass. Then the more vulgar elements of the aristocracy took it up, and since then, it’s moved down to department-store windows and the caterers who do weddings for social nonentities. There’s nothing so infuriating as a lack of culture when people have the means to avoid it.’
    It seemed to Carvalho that the purple veins had grown a shade darker beneath the thin layer of face powder. The