Society
A little suckling baby pig it might have been, but eating it felt so liberating
Published 21 February 2000
Over the years I've had what can only be regarded as more than my fair share of trouble with suckling pigs. When I first landed in Madrid with Ruth in the early 1980s, I had no idea that they were likely to feature on the average menu, let alone come to dominate our entire interpersonal agenda. We were, after all, in Madrid for purely aesthetic reasons. Ruth reckoned she could fully grasp Foucault's analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas only if she stood stock still in front of the picture in the Prado for several days. "Isn't there a football match you could go to?" she asked, when I gently complained that I'd already seen quite enough of the Infanta and the dwarf and the dog and the man coming into the room through the door at the back to last a lifetime. ("He may not be coming in," Ruth murmured. "He may be going out. That's the whole point.")
We ran into the suckling pig on our second day in town. We were strolling near the main drag around lunchtime when I glanced into a window and saw what I assumed to be an abnormally large duck rotating on a spit. "Looks yummy," I said. Ruth visibly recoiled. "Oh God. It's a little pig. A piglet. A baby pig." I sensed that each successive sentimentalising of the object was further reducing my chance of ever eating it, but that evening, in the restaurant that Ruth had chosen because of its slightly GaudI decor (modernisme, she told me, had absolutely nothing to do with "modernism"), I spotted something called "cochinillo" on the menu and quietly pointed to it while Ruth busily searched for her customary Spanish omelette.
I might have got away with it if the plate had arrived unannounced, but a few moments later I turned to find our waiter holding out a salver on which lay an entire extended piglet - a couchant cochinillo - which looked so fearfully lifelike that I even suspected that the slight smirk on its face had been specifically aroused by the prospect of Ruth's indignation.
"Perfecto," I whispered, confining my eye contact to the piglet. "You realise," said Ruth, "that's not just a little pig. It's a suckling pig." I was no longer in the mood for compromise. The thought of tucking into something more substantial than an anchovy fillet induced sudden recklessness. "It's not a suckling pig now," I hissed. "All pigs suckle at some time. It's merely a young pig. Like a young lamb or a young rabbit." Neither did I give way when my cooked pig arrived. "You're not eating the skin," said Ruth. "It's no longer skin," I told her. "It's crackling. And what's wrong with skin? All animals have skin in exactly the same way that all the eggs they break to make your tedious Spanish omelettes have shells."
As I realised later, when I was lying on the floor beside our hotel bed after Ruth had refused to sleep with anyone whose lips might still bear the aroma of piglet grease, there's absolutely nothing like a relentlessly pursued but inappropriate analogy to sever a relationship.
I thought of Ruth again last weekend in Barcelona as the fireworks announcing the beginning of Carnestoltes snapped outside my restaurant window in the Placa de Pi. I'd relished those days together when we'd taken turns reading Anais Nin in bed, and I'd learnt a lot from her about Foucault, Velazquez and modernisme; but when the waiter brought my cochinillo for inspection, I felt a sudden surge of liberation. "Esta buenIsimo," I said, patting its nose with my forefinger and noting with satisfaction that the angle of its mouth no longer suggested a smirk so much as a healthy chuckle.
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