Judging by his thinness, one might think that Mariano Sigman (Buenos Aires, 50 years old) does not like to eat too much, but I met him with 25 kilos more than he weighs now, I have seen Homeric hecatombs on the grill of his house and I know that if Mariano is thin, it is not due to a lack of appetite, but because in the last four years he has dedicated himself to burning his lores with the maniacal fury of an arsonist, embarking on an experiment with his own body that has transformed him into a cyclist. professional: he went from not being able to go around the Casa de Campo to bypassing the Autonomous Community of Madrid doing 400 kilometers in a single day.
He tells it all in his successful essay
The power of words
(Debate, 2022).
During that time, he also set out to be a musician without having any idea and learned to play the guitar with enough solvency, he even recorded an album in which Jorge Drexler collaborated.
Mariano, who is a renowned neuroscientist (he was one of the directors of the Human Brain Project), popularizer and essayist, likes to explore the limits of learning and transformation capacity at ages where the rest of us already give everything up for lost.
He has the gift of eloquence and evangelizes without meaning to.
One day he arrived from Argentina, he moved to my street without knowing anyone and after a year there are several of us neighbors who have ended up with a road bike and a guitar, delusionally believing that we could also transform our lives.
I find that eating is the best way to talk about food and there is no more inspiring place to imagine a banquet than a place where you can really eat well, which is why we have met at La Buena Vida restaurant in Madrid.
Mariano limps in, still recovering from the multiple femur fracture that may have ended his career as a cyclist, although you never know with him.
Know this section and warn us that everything he tells us will probably be false, he will tell how he would like his last dinner to be because reality would be very boring: "Being who I am, if I knew it was my last dinner, it would be crap, no I could get out of that idea, I would need morphine or some hard drug that would allow me not to be obsessed with the sadness of leaving the world and not be scared shitless thinking about the time I would stay”.
Then he specifies that it does not have to be morphine or any drug, it may even be a person who knows how to give the hug he needs to have a good time, in peace and love.
She prefers not to define that magical help that gets her out of the rut and that is why she calls it
Nepente,
which in ancient Greek means no-pain and is a mysterious substance that appears in the
Odyssey:
Helen of Troy secretly pours it into the cup of her husband, Menelaus, during their children's wedding so that he can talk about the trauma of the Trojan War and of all the friends who are not here today without feeling sad and without losing the spirit of celebrating.
"I would look for nepente to be able to dye the entire evening with the colors that I would like it to have."
Once the mood has been resolved, Mariano considers the attendance, which he estimates at about 60 people: "My thing would not be in
petit committee,
but neither would it be a
rave
or a Roman orgy."
We all have a council of life, he explains, where the different chapters and places where it has taken place are.
He tells that his life is very discontinuous: he had one in Buenos Aires, where he was born;
soon he fled with his family from the dictatorship to Barcelona, the city where he lived until he was 13 years old;
later he returned to a very changed Argentina;
he had another stage in New York, where he received his doctorate in Neuroscience;
another in Paris, where he was a researcher, and now he has his life in Madrid.
Each chapter has a geography and each geography corresponds to an affective circle of people, and, therefore, it is impossible for him to gather the people of his different lives in the same place;
but since this is a fantasy, here all their lives come to the same table and are finally one.
“My children, my wife, my family would come and then that other family that is the family of life, dear friends…, those people to whom you want to give a long and extended hug.
Of course, this dinner could not come any cast ".
This last thing I know he tells me because at his 50th birthday party, which was recently, I sneaked in three or four people I didn't know.
For his peace of mind, I assure you that no one would want to sneak in or be the one to sneak into the intimate celebration of a guy who is waiting for imminent death.
“You know what, I'm going to change my mind, I wish there were coladas…, a colada gives lightness and freshness to a party, I'd embrace it anyway,” he tells me as he chews on a plate of black trumpets of the dead.
“With the cast we would prevent everything from being an exercise in remembering, looking back, sadness taking over the situation;
That someone new comes is fine, no matter how little time is left, I would like to discover something or someone that day”.
Nor is it that Mariano wants to ban sadness:
fade out
of that Leonard Cohen song whose chorus repeats 'to laugh and cry and laugh and cry about it all again' [laugh and cry and laugh and cry about everything again] and at the end it fades without you knowing where it ends”.
Where does all this happen, I ask him.
"I don't know, it doesn't matter."
Instantly she corrects herself and proclaims spontaneously and with full conviction: in Cadaqués.
Then he is thoughtful.
“I don't know why”, he says, he has never been to Cadaqués, but suddenly he imagines Duchamp there playing chess with his friends and it is clear to him: the Cadaqués of 60 years ago.
Mariano Sigman at La Buena Vida restaurant in Madrid. Coco Dávez
Here it is time to clarify that if Mariano likes something, it is games, starting with chess.
Many times I have surprised him at a dinner or in a meeting looking absorbed at the mobile screen;
At first he thought that he would be watching Twitter or Instagram, like everyone today, but he follows live chess games.
He would like many things to be played at his last dinner, perhaps not chess, but something more cheerful like mus, a game he asked me to teach him the first time I met him and after a month he was beating us everyone in the neighborhood.
Well, we have the diners, place, decks, but we need to
morph
.
“Here I can imagine something Roman, excessive, there must be a lot, but a lot;
there they all die…, then some revive”.
I ask him to specify the menu and Mariano warns me that it's going to be long.
“To begin with, there has to be a memorable grill, firewood, fire, a lot of meats smoking, there the Argentine comes out unfailingly, it is a roast, offal, sweetbreads, strip, loin, meat coming out continuously…;
besides, I am the one who cooks, I feed everyone”.
The good thing about barbecue, he tells us, is that it is a communal meal that is made over time, it stretches out all day, it calms down and fades away and then it is revived with more firewood and more pieces come in.
In any case, the barbecue ends at some point and, after that protein maelstrom, something arrives at Mariano's dinner that he cannot define.
Then he talks about Sacha Hormaechea, and tells how, before taking over his parents' restaurant, he was a food photographer at a time when new dishes were beginning to be invented that could no longer be described with words, and photography became a necessary tool for the chronicle. gastronomy, "and what I want to say with all this is that the things I would like to eat that night I cannot count with words..., maybe I could draw them".
He then recalls the feelings he had the first time he went to DiverXO (they must have been so strong that he forgot I was sitting next to him), he couldn't believe what appeared on the table, and it was no longer the food, but the staging, theatricalization of everything, the constant surprise with the flavors and presentations.
The intensity of that gastronomic experience is related to others that have the same weight in his memory, despite the fact that there was no preparation or sophisticated presentations.
He rescues a moment in the Tokyo fish market, where they opened a tuna "like a big torpedo" and gave him a piece of meat directly from the animal.
It was not only the taste, but the place, again the staging as well.
From there he jumps to a simple piece of bread and butter that he once had in France,
and that when he sank his teeth he was certain that he was eating the richest delicacy in the entire universe.
"It was in a restaurant in Paris with three Michelin stars, but I don't remember the name of the place or the rest of the menu, only that bread and butter that seemed like ecstasy to me."
At this point the conversation turns into a monologue and Mariano embarks on a Proustian journey in which he recreates before us midnight in a Buenos Aires bakery, paellas at friends' houses, perfect sandwiches, ice cream, fruit.
Coco Dávez at some point interrupts, worried about Mariano's story, to tell him that it will be impossible to illustrate his last dinner, but Mariano is unable to stop, he is traveling through time, for all the lives he has had: this is a dream, he says, it doesn't matter if it's possible or not, let's keep dreaming.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber