The Empanada Brotherhood
Read The Empanada Brotherhood Online
Authors: John Nichols
THE EMPANADA BROTHERHOOD
Also by John Nichols
Fiction
The Sterile Cuckoo
The Wizard of Loneliness
The Milagro Beanfield War
The Magic Journey
A Ghost in the Music
The Nirvana Blues
American Blood
An Elegy for September
Conjugal Bliss
The Voice of the Butterfly
Nonfiction
If Mountains Die
(with William Davis)
The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn
On the Mesa
A Fragile Beauty
The Sky's the Limit
Keep It Simple
Dancing on the Stones
An American Child Supreme
EMPANADA BROTHERHOOD
A NOVEL
JOHN NICHOLS
Copyright © 2007 by John Nichols.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN: 978-0-8118-7066-5
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.
SOME NOTES ON LANGUAGE AND PRONUNCIATION
Argentines commonly use
vos
instead of
tú
as the second-person pronoun. Their singular present tense and imperative verb endings correspond roughly to the plural
vosotros
of European Spanish. This changes “normal” spelling and placement of accents, confusing people outside of Argentina.
The command
dale
â“come on,” “let's go”âis pronounced “
dah
-lay.” The bitter tea
yerba mate
is “yerba
mah
-tay.” A
piba
is a lovely young woman. And
che
is a vocative used to call attention, loosely meaning “hey,” or “you,” or “hey, you.”
Lyrics to the tangos that appear in this book were translated by the author. Page 9, “Anclao en ParÃs,” lyrics by Enrique Cadicamo, music by Guillermo Barbieri. Page 52, “RÃe payaso,” lyrics by Emilio Falero, music by Virgilio Carmona. Page 100, “Cuando tú no estás,” lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera and Mario Zoppi Battistella, music by Carlos Gardel and Marcel Lattes. Page 195, “Adiós muchachos,” lyrics by Cesar Vedani, music by Julio César Sanders.
Designed by Adam Machacek
Chronicle Books LLC
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San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com
To Ãureo Roldán
Oh how I yearn for your gentle caress!
Here I am stranded without money or friends.
Who knows but one night I'll be captured by death â¦
Then it's âCiao,' Buenos Aires, I'll never see you again.
âFrom a tango sung by Carlos Gardel
54. A Ticket Out of the Ghetto
EPILOGUE: How to Eat an Empanada
Adriana | Eduardo's ex, who “hates” him. |
Alfonso | A math genius with two fiancées. |
Aurelio Porta | The man from Uruguay. |
Ãureo Roldán | Boss of the empanada stand. |
Blondie | The narrator, a shy gringo. |
Carlos the Artist | A Dadaist painter. |
Cathy Escudero | A beautiful flamenco dancer. |
Chuy | An obnoxious gigolo with just one hand. |
El Coco | Luigi's bizarre pal. |
Eddie Ortega | Bagman for the Puerto Rican mob. |
Eduardo | Adriana's ex, an imaginary cuckold. |
Esther | Wife of Carlos the Artist. |
Gino | Tall, handsome, Roldán's part-time helper. |
Greta Garbo | Chuy's “accountant.” |
Irene Dupree | A waitress at the Downtown Café. |
Jorge | Just a kid, but a great guitarist. |
Luigi | The little guy with a burnt face. |
Martha | She has blue hair and big tits. |
Molly | Eduardo's second wife. |
La Petisa | Petite, bold, everybody's girlfriend. |
Popeye | The tattooed sailor with no teeth. |
Renata | Alfonso's passionate, crazy fiancée. |
Santiago Chávez | A baker (who appears only once). |
SofÃa | Alfonso's boring, pragmatic fiancée. |
Around ten
P.M.
one evening in early October a taxi veered to the MacDougal Street curb and a woman got out. Adriana, Eduardo's ex-wife, stumbled on her way over to the empanada stand but a college kid wearing a CCNY sweatshirt caught her. Adriana shook him off irately. She was almost thirty, a few years older than Eduardo, and wore red high heels and a raincoat. Her hair was fetchingly tousled. She had a thin erotic face that was twisted in anger.
“I'm looking for Eduardo,” she said in Spanish. “Where is that bastard?” Her words were slurred from drinking and she delivered them with a phony Castilian accent.
“He hasn't been around tonight,” Ãureo Roldán explained politely. He was the cook at the stand, a fat man from Buenos Aires. In fact he owned the business, which was right in the middle of Greenwich Village between the Hip Bagel and the Figaro coffeehouse. “I haven't seen Eduardo for a couple of days,” he said.
“You're lying, jefe. I know he comes here all the time. He's a prick and I want to kill him. He ruined my life, he brought me to this stinking country, and now I'm all alone and I can't function because I'm so upset and I hate him.”
Adriana burst into tears. She put her elbows on the stand's window ledge facing the sidewalk, buried her face in her hands, and really sobbed, all the while excoriating Eduardo in language unbecoming to a female. Luigi slipped out of the narrow alley inside the smoky cubicle and put his arm around Adriana for comfort. But when he touched her she reacted as if a lightning bolt had struck, and, lurching away abruptly, she lost her balance, pitching onto the pavement.
Alfonso and Popeye raced from the kiosk to help Adriana. But she got up quickly, shaking her finger at Luigi, who was a little guy with cauliflower ears and terribly burnt features. She yelled, “Stay away from me you ugly jerk!”
Her face was already streaked with mascara. Alfonso said, “Calmate, vos. Nobody here wants to hurt you. We're sorry about the divorce.”
“No you're not,” she hissed back at him. “You men are all alike. You
enjoy
hurting women.”
Then she turned around and teetered into the street, waving for a taxi.
Her sudden arrival and departure provoked a philosophical discussion among us about suffering: Who hurts more in a relationship, the man or the woman? Alfonso said, “The man does, but you don't see it. We hide our emotions. Women yell and scream a lot, releasing all the tension. That's why they live longer.”
“But we treat them like dirt,” Roldán said, scooping an empanada from the grease bin and putting it on a paper plate set on a skinny counter between the alley and his cooking area, which was barely five feet square. The entire kiosk was only eight feet wide and seven deep. The empanadas Roldán sold were small fried pies filled with beef or cheese or pork, or quince and raisins. You could also buy soft drinks, pastelitos, and thimble cups of dulce de leche.
“Women deserve what they get,” Gino said. “That's their role in life.” Gino sometimes worked at the kiosk on Roldán's night off. “Except for American chicks,” he added. “They are so spoiled. I think American men are hopeless.”
Popeye was prematurely bald and had tattoos of big-breasted pinup girls on his biceps. He said, “I love the minas, and if they want to play I'm their guy. I've spent all my money wenching and I don't regret a penny. But if they start to cry? It's sayonara. I love pussy but I won't tolerate sorrow.”