Mysteries of butter

When I was little, very little, I loved going with my mother to El Corte Inglés in Plaça Catalunya. She would buy what she had to buy (something that when you are 3 years old seems mortally boring…), but she made sure of my docile good face throughout the process by then taking me to the cafeteria for a snack. El Corte Inglés cafeterias have always been like ocean liners, what am I saying, like aircraft carriers. Time and fashions pass, and they maintain their hieratic monumentality, which reminds a bit of that of the pyramids of Egypt.

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For me, it was undoubtedly the pyramid of the snack because I always ordered the same thing: a kind of breadsticks that were served with thin loops of butter, a kind of curled butter, which I couldn't stop loving. For the presentation, which at the time was the height of sophistication ---it wasn't difficult to suppose that if the Queen of England invited you to snack one day, she would serve you something like that--- but, above all, for the taste. I am not exaggerating if I say that the taste of that butter marked my childhood, and it marked it deeply, moreover. With a stubbornness that makes me, many years later, still remember that "El Corte Inglés butter" that tasted like no other.

Of course, it had nothing to do with what we ate at home. How many times my mother tried to persuade me to spread homemade butter on bread and I rebelled, denying the major premise that "it was the same." My mother assured me that the only difference was the curls, that at home we had nothing to curl it like that, but otherwise, where was the blessed difference?

I didn't have the dialectical skills I have now, and even less against my mother, so I just pouted and refused to snack.

I'm saying this was when I was three. At four, we had moved to Granada, and there they enrolled me in a convent school where at first no one spoke my language. Of course, they didn't know a word of Catalan. But when they started speaking that Castilian that didn't sound like any I had known before, my eyes would open wide, scared…

I remember that the shock of the first day only subsided, precisely, at snack time. They gave me bread with butter and… voilà! For some strange reason, the nuns in Granada had exactly the same magical butter as the cafeteria at El Corte Inglés in Plaça Catalunya! Well, the nuns didn't curl it, of course, but the taste, the texture, the very specific weight on the tongue…

That day I returned home much more self-assured and full of questions. Finally, the undeniable reality of the facts prevailed: the butter at my house had never tasted like El Corte Inglés's, nor like the nuns', for the simple reason that… it wasn't butter. It was vegetable margarine, very fashionable in Catalan and Spanish homes of the time. Because it was cheaper and because, in addition, it was lighter and "healthier," or so TV commercials vehemently claimed.

Finally, the great mystery was revealed, finally justice was done to my childish gourmet instinct, to my absolute certainty that what they said was "the same," well no, it had nothing to do with it. It might even be more recommendable from a certain point of view. But to be the same, no way. Even the Andalusian clergy had it clear.

A few more years passed, not many, and I remembered this story when my dear parents joined the intrepid caravan of Catalan couples who every weekend left the girl (me) with grandma to escape to Perpignan to see Last Tango in Paris. This acclaimed Bertolucci film would not premiere in Barcelona until 1978, but it had premiered six years earlier in France. I perfectly remember that my mother made that trip pregnant with my little sister. And I, again at the height of innocence, without even imagining the real reason for the excursion, could only protest because my little sister had been to France (even if in fetal, prenatal phase)…, before me, who was the eldest. I didn't stop protesting such an injustice until, I seem to recall in 1980, my parents then left my little sister with grandma and took me to cross the Pyrenees, not to Perpignan or the cinema this time, but to a very emotionally significant town for us called Le Grau du Roi, which by the way, in time I discovered is the setting for a disturbing novel by Ernest Hemingway…

I could swear it was after seeing Last Tango… when my mother finally gave in and admitted that butter and margarine were not exactly the same. But I could be wrong.

Oh, what innocent times, with so much to discover…