Nero Wolf

Overweight among orchids...



the real thing


When was the first time you heard about Montenegro? Balkan Wars? Wrong. Nero Wolfe crime novels? Right. In Rex Stout's books, the famously intelligent and famously overweight crime-solver was born in Montenegro. And what else do you remember about Nero Wolfe? His patronizing of Mr. Archibald Goodwyn, his assistant? Wrong. His after-lunch afternoons spent with his orchids? Absolutely right. Is this blogtext named after Wolfe because of Montenegro, crime-fiction or weighwatcher concerns? Triply wrong. Because of orchids, then? Absolutely right again.

The pretext for the seafood-soup & codfish-with-cream dinner was the recently acquisition of the orchid-like installation (untitled, 100 x 130cm) by Ms Mate Gonzalez who honoured us all with her presence. At some point, around the circular table where eight orchids were having to bear the air-con generated winds, someone introduced the theme "what's the spark for a relationship?". Apart from the consensual "sense of humour" as a key feature, I regret to say that, although firmly cowed into making positive contributions to the discussion, the lady-guests declined to be specific. Even Letuce, an helicopter pilot who fantasizes about five chicos (she refused to be more specific in this point too) failed to contribute.

Now, then, if this blogger of yours entertains at home should it be a legitimate subject-matter for a blogtext, the Honourable Reader might ask with due property. Will it not cross some consensual red-line? I would encourage all my last night guests to have blogs of their own and to have a go at how they spent a few hours among orchids. In the absence of the expected surge in blog-building I will have then to go on and write about it myself.

The characters have already made some guest-star appearance in this blog, including Clavellita, with flowery sandals that stretched the limits of dinner-partying dress code, who talked at lenght about the virtues of silence and meditation (was I talking too much?).

As always in Madrid all the ideas of punctuality do not apply. A 9.30 invitation for dinner, with expected soup on the table at 10 something and pudding in that very same day, turns into a 22.45 arrival of the last guest, with dinner starting after 11 and cheesecake with raspberries already on the following day's earlier hours .

Around the time some of us were thinking eagerly about bedtime - to sleep, I rush to say - we had a late batch of guests arriving, fresh from a dinner in Salamanca (neighborhood, not city) . Among them a Colombian actress with german-like features with green XL eyes, Marcellina, with whom I enjoyed reviving my Bogota to Cartagena adventurous trip.

Either because of the relative saltiness of the soup, or the sodium content of codfish or the drying properties of a persistent air-conditioning, water with ice was received with almost Saahra-crossing exultation.

Is water the new whisky?..