Back in 1985, Spain was preparing to enter the European Economic Community, an entry that occurred on January 1 of the following year. The newspaper suggested that I take a literary trip through those countries that from now on were going to be our partners. Ortega’s dream could finally come true, and he never tired of repeating that the solution to Spain’s problem lay in Europe. We Spaniards entered that club, perhaps, without having completely lost our minds and although we were assigned the tail car, the truth is that our country was traveling at the same speed on that train. When Churchill was asked what he thought of the French, he replied: “I don’t know. I don’t know them all.” Well, the same thing happened to me, so on those trips I saved myself the trouble of getting to know the European inhabitants one by one; However, I still keep some flashes evanescent from that experience.
Upon arriving in Holland, I already knew that the best potatoes in Europe were those from Friesland, a region in the north of the country, which had deserved to be painted by Van Gogh in his early days. In those paintings you could see peasants, men and women, crouching on the ground sowing those tubers, then collecting them in a bowl. I thought they would be doubly tasty after Van Gogh had painted them, but also in Holland there were Rembrandt and Vermeer from Delft. Upon arriving in France, entering through Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais I saw many grandmothers with a lulu dog, retirees whose bodies were stretched out on the leash of an Afghan, solitary gentlemen with violet jaws made from slurping up many oysters who were being pulled by a mastiff in front of the blue rope of the bay. If at that moment they had asked me what I would like to be, I would have answered: it wouldn’t be bad to be a poodle in the arms of a mature woman in Nice and to sit at the table at the Le Chantecler restaurant in the Negresco hotel to know that in France true culinary wisdom is in the literature on the menu and not on the plate. And also in France there were the impressionism of Monet, the fauvism of Matisse and Alphavilleby Godard.
Upon arriving in Denmark, in the center of Copenhagen I found the Christiania anarchist reserve, 100 hectares of absolute freedom surrounded by barbed wire fences. On a wall at the entrance this slogan was written in red letters: “No God, no Lord.” In that libertarian commune some approximately human beings lived in a cabin built among the treetops. On the island of Funen I attended a mass celebrated by an Anglican priestess who had paid her way through ecclesiastical studies by serving in topless in a cocktail bar. I had never attended a religious ceremony performed with such exquisiteness. And also in Denmark there were the story writer Andersen, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the Little Mermaid.
The octogenarian Josep Pla was asked what his best dream was. “Being 20 years old and going to Italy for the first time,” he answered. It is often said that gods are changed before food. If this is so, Italy has achieved the miracle of imposing pasta on half the world, a very fragrant cuisine built by chefs who are bakers and also Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Vatican were in Italy. In Germany the scar of the Berlin Wall was still on display. To the east of Checkpoint Charlie were dusty storefronts of pickled cucumbers and to the west the glittering splendor of Kudamm Avenue. From this side, the Mercedes star on top of a skyscraper challenged the Marxist doctrine that was pouring from the lollipop on the other side. However, for me Germany was still the ascent of Thomas Mann’s magic mountain. Luxembourg was green hills and on that juicy pasture the blue-eyed cows allowed themselves the luxury of lying down without eating, not like what happened with the Spanish cows. Flocks of Eurobureaucrats loaded with papers passed through Luxembourg, coming and going from Strasbourg to Brussels.
In Belgium, that June 21st was the festival of the sun and of course it was raining. According to what they told me, the first lesson to learn in Belgium is to live with water. However, in the restaurants of Brussels the fusion of powerful German cuisine with the sophisticated preparation of French cuisine has been built and the result was a work of art at the service of the palates of the MEPs. Upon arriving in Ireland I already knew that in that country Joyce is a disease and it was the case that all the nuns were Irish. In Dublin, after drinking five pints of Guinness in a row, you ran the risk of finding yourself praying the rosary with your family. With Portugal hand in hand we enter Europe. Greece was there thanks to Socrates, Pericles and Plato, who had founded the foundations of democracy, an illusion that today risks breaking into pieces.