Bitter

“I should tell you,” said Don Aurelio, “that I am a republican.”

He said it on the pavement outside his bar at four o’clock on Friday afternoon, in Spanish, in front of a guard of honour of the Federal Guard in plumed helmets, a band, about two thousand people, three television cameras, and the King, and he said it pleasantly, the way a man tells you that he is left-handed, or that he does not eat fish.

“I’ve always been a republican. My father was a republican. My grandfather was in the Plaza de Mayo every ninth of July from 1946 until he died.” He held out his hand. “I serve everybody. Even kings. Welcome to La Esquina.”

Frederick shook it.

“Thank you,” he said, in Spanish. “My Spanish teacher would like you.”

“Is she a republican?”

“She’s furious with me for the rest of her life,” said Frederick. “It’s not quite the same thing.”

Don Aurelio considered this, and laughed, a short bark, like a door being kicked open, and the guard of honour of the Federal Guard, which had not been told what to do if the landlord laughed, presented arms.

---

La Esquina was a corner bar in San Telmo, on a street of old two-storey houses with iron balconies and cracked blue tiles, and it had been a corner bar since 1871, and it had a long wooden counter with a zinc top, and black and white tiles on the floor, and a ceiling fan that did not work and another that did, and photographs on every wall of football teams and tango singers and men in hats, and it was, at half past four on the thirteenth of February, ninety-four degrees inside, and humid, so that the air felt, Theo said, behind the bar in the Cranwell apron, which he had taken off and then put back on because Mrs Merriweather had said on the telephone that he had to, like breathing soup.

“Thirty-four,” said Theo. “And a half.”

“You’ve stopped saying it’s January.”

“It’s February,” said Theo, with feeling, “and it’s still wrong.”

But Theo was happy. Frederick could see it. Theo had chosen Spanish in ninth grade, at Ellicott, instead of French, because Señora Ruiz had told the ninth grade that Spanish was spoken by four hundred million people and French by a great many fewer, most of whom were insufferable, and Theo had taken her at her word, and for the first time in the year he was behind a bar in a country where he could understand what people were saying to him. He was still terrible. He dropped a glass at a quarter to five and gave a man a soda water when he had asked for a beer. But he did it in Spanish, and said perdón, and the man laughed and said something about Milwaukee, and Theo laughed back, and Frederick, at the other end of the bar, thought it was the most at home he had seen him since Clare.

---

The mate was at six. On camera.

It was in the schedule, in the blue folder. 1800 hours. The Sovereign is invited to share mate with the regulars of La Esquina. Broadcast live on the national network. Duration: eight minutes. There had been a long discussion in the back room on the Tuesday before about whether mate counted under Rule Five, which forbade the Sovereign from tasting spirits on live television, and Mr Quennell had ruled, with relief, that it did not, mate being, he had established by telephone with the Embassy, an infusion of leaves, and Bridget had said she did not see how that was different from tea, and the Duke, at the dartboard, had said bitter, which was the only thing he knew about mate, and was right.

So at six o’clock the King came out from behind the bar and sat down at a round table by the window with six regulars of La Esquina and Don Aurelio and three cameras, and Don Aurelio put a gourd on the table.

It was a small round gourd, dark brown, polished, with a silver rim, and sticking up out of it was a silver straw with a flattened bulb at the bottom, full of holes, like a tiny watering can. The gourd was full of something green and dry and powdery, packed in at an angle, so that it was banked up on one side like a slope of sand. Don Aurelio picked up a kettle, not boiling, he said, never boiling, and poured hot water very carefully into the low side of the slope, and the green went dark and wet and gave off a smell like a field after rain, and a great deal like the inside of a hay barn, and he drank it, the first one, himself, all of it, through the straw, until the gourd made a gurgling sound, and then filled it again and passed it to the King.

“The first is always the server’s,” said Don Aurelio. “It’s the bitterest. Then it goes round. Each person drinks it all, and gives it back. The server fills it. It goes on.” He held the gourd out. “Drink.”

Frederick took it.

He drank. It was hot, and very bitter, and green, and grassy, and it tasted like a lawn that had been brewed, and he drank it all, as he had been told, until the straw gurgled, and his eyes watered very slightly, and the three cameras were close on his face, and he thought, it’s all right, it’s like a strong tea, and he was so relieved that it was all right that he did what he had been doing all his life when given a cup of something by somebody’s grandmother.

He stirred it.

He took the silver straw between his finger and thumb and moved it round the gourd, gently, the way you stir a cup of tea to get the sugar from the bottom, so as to be polite, so as to get the last of it.

The table went silent.

Six regulars of La Esquina looked at the straw.

Don Aurelio looked at the straw.

On the national network, Frederick found out later from Theo, who watched it four times that night on his phone in the hotel, the presenter, a young woman in a linen jacket who had been talking warmly over the pictures for four minutes about the hospitality of the porteño corner bar, stopped talking. For three seconds there was no commentary at all. Then she said, in a voice like a doctor delivering bad news, he moved the bombilla.

“You don’t stir it,” said Don Aurelio, very gently.

“I’m so sorry.”

“You never stir it. Never. It’s a sin. It blocks the holes.” He took the gourd back and looked into it, sadly, as though somebody had trodden on a small animal. “It’s all right. It happens to Europeans.”

“I’m not European.”

“Today you are,” said Don Aurelio, and began, slowly and carefully, with a spoon, to repair the slope.

Frederick sat back.

He was so relieved that it had not been worse, and so grateful to Don Aurelio for being kind about it, that he did the second thing.

“Gracias,” he said.

The table went silent again.

Don Aurelio stopped repairing the slope.

He looked at the King. He looked at the gourd. Then, slowly, with an expression of enormous regret, he put the gourd down on the table, in front of himself, not in front of the King, and did not pass it back.

“You said thank you,” he said.

“Yes. For the mate.”

“When you say gracias,” said Don Aurelio, “it means you’ve had enough. It means I’m finished, don’t give me any more.” He put his hand flat on the gourd. “So I can’t give you any more. You’ve said. On the national network.” He looked at the cameras. “In front of forty-six million people.”

Frederick looked at the gourd.

“Can I take it back?”

“No,” said Don Aurelio. “But you can say it was a mistake. In Spanish. To the camera.” He nodded at it. “It’ll help.”

So the King turned to the camera, in La Esquina, at eight minutes past six on the thirteenth of February, and said in Spanish, at Señora Ruiz’s standard, which was very high, that he had stirred the straw because in his house you stirred things, and he had said thank you because in his house you always said thank you, and he was sorry, and he would like some more mate, please, if that was allowed, and he would not say gracias again until he meant it.

Don Aurelio, who was a republican, and whose grandfather had been in the Plaza de Mayo every ninth of July from 1946, looked at the King for a long moment.

Then he picked up the gourd, and filled it, and passed it to him across the table.

The presenter, on the national network, started talking again.

---

At eight a woman came in from Chubut.

She was about seventy, small and round, with grey hair in a plait and a bag over her arm, and she had come, she said, on the overnight bus, nineteen hours, from a town in the Chubut valley where the Welsh had settled in 1865, because she had seen in the paper that the King had said a sentence in Welsh at the State Opening in London in November 2030, and she wanted to hear it. She came to the bar and looked at him and said something.

It was in Welsh. He knew it was in Welsh, because he recognised the sound of it, the soft fast consonants and the double l that was not a sound in any other language, the sound Mr Pryce had made at Coln with his nose like the coast of Norway. He did not understand a word of it.

He looked at her.

He had one sentence in Welsh. Mr Pryce had given it to him in November 2030, for the State Opening, and he had said it from the Throne, and it had been on the front page of every paper in Wales. It was the only thing he could say in Welsh, and it meant I am a guest in this house, and I will try to be a good one.

He said it.

The woman from Chubut put her bag down on the bar.

“That’s the one,” she said, in English, with a Welsh accent and a Spanish one at the same time, which he had not known was possible. “That’s the one from the paper.” She looked at him. “I asked you for a tea.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry,” said the woman from Chubut. “That’s better than a tea.” And she took a handkerchief out of her bag and blew her nose, and then said, “But I’d still like a tea, love,” and Theo, who had been listening, made her one, and it was the best thing Theo made all night.

---

The bitter was at ten.

It was not in the schedule. That was the thing. The schedule said mate, and mate had happened, and the cameras had gone at half past six. But at ten o’clock, when the bar was full, and loud, and ninety degrees, and somebody had started singing a tango by the window, badly, and a man at the bar had asked the King for a fernet con coca, and he had not known what it was, Don Aurelio came down the bar and took a bottle off the shelf.

It was a dark bottle, with a label he did not recognise, and Don Aurelio poured a little of what was in it into a tall glass with ice, a finger, very dark, nearly black, and then filled the glass up with cola, and it foamed up brown and fast, like stout, with a tan head, and Don Aurelio slid it across the bar to the man, and then, after a moment, poured a second one, and slid it to the King.

“You should know what you’re serving,” he said.

Frederick picked it up.

There was a photographer from a Buenos Aires paper by the door, and he had his camera up, because somebody in a bar in the Plate was always holding up a camera, and Mr Quennell, at the end of the bar beside Kimura, half rose off his stool and said Rule Five in a strangled voice, and Kimura put a hand on his arm and said it’s not live, it’s a photograph, and Mr Quennell sat down.

Frederick drank.

It was bitter. It was more bitter than the mate. It was bitter like medicine, like the inside of a root, like herbs that had been steeped for a year in the dark, and it was sweet at the same time from the cola, and cold, and it fizzed, and there was something in the middle of it, mint or liquorice or something he could not name, that went up the back of his nose and opened his eyes very wide, and he stood there with the glass in his hand behind the bar of La Esquina and did not say anything, because he could not think of anything, and then he drank the rest of it, all of it, in one go, standing up, because he wanted to, not because he had been told.

He put the glass down.

“Can I have another?” he said, in Spanish.

The photographer by the door took the picture.

---

It was on the front of every paper in the Plate on Saturday. It was the picture of the King behind the bar of La Esquina with an empty glass in his hand and his eyes wide open and his mouth open as well, mid-word, saying otro, and the headlines said things like THE KING LIKES FERNET and EL REY Y EL FERNET and, in one paper, the one Don Aurelio read, which was republican, EVEN THE KING.

At eleven on Saturday morning, the provincial government of Córdoba, which is the province of the Plate where the bitter is drunk more than anywhere else on earth, and which had been, in its time, the most republican province in the federation, issued a short statement. It said that the King’s evident enjoyment of the province’s favourite drink was a source of great pride to the people of Córdoba, and that the provincial legislature had resolved, by a large majority, in a special session called that morning, to declare Monday the sixteenth of February a provincial holiday, in his honour, to be known as the Day of the King’s Bitter.

The motion had passed fifty-one to nine. Several of the nine, the statement said, had voted against on republican principle, and had asked that it be recorded that they intended to observe the holiday anyway.

Don Aurelio read the statement aloud at the bar at noon, to the King, with his glasses on the end of his nose.

“Fifty-one to nine,” he said, and took the glasses off. “In Córdoba.” He looked at the King across the zinc counter of La Esquina. “My grandfather would be very angry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Don Aurelio poured two glasses of the bitter, and filled them up with cola, and pushed one across the bar. “He’d have taken the holiday.”

He lifted his glass.

“To the republic,” he said.

Frederick lifted his.

“To your grandfather,” he said, which was as far as a King could go, and both of them knew it, and drank, and Don Aurelio laughed his short bark of a laugh, like a door being kicked open, and the guard of honour of the Federal Guard, who were on the pavement outside, because they had been sent back for the second day, and who still had not been told what to do when the landlord laughed, presented arms.