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Eating with two cheeks, eating with a full mouth, is something that can be moving or appalling, depending on whether or not one lives in what is called the welfare state, which also has to be seen. It is not the same as a child of the Spanish post-war period devoutly grabbing a chicken thigh, exhausted by the fatigue – all of his stomach already rumbling – as a contemporary American kid with obesity entrusting his gasping breath to another hamburger, in a turbo-capitalist world where those who do not consume with anxiety always seem to be missing out on something.
There is something radically beautiful and heartbreaking in satisfied hunger: not so much in gluttony. It is like sex with love, it is like drinking water with thirst. The starving child in front of a plate of hot food awakens an unbearable tenderness, a raging yearning for justice. One wants to take to the streets and fight whoever it takes to put this mess back into orbit. The image of the anaemic child is an eternal, universal psychological and sentimental archetype, like the dead whale on the shore that speaks to us of the breakdown of a civilisation, or like the train that leaves without one, that refers to our lost opportunities. A child longing for something to put in its mouth is all that is wrong with the world.
And what a joy it is to see him eating with two cheeks.
One finally understands why our grandmothers enjoyed overfeeding us so much. “I’m going to make you another fried egg,” they would say, and they would wipe their fingers busily on their aprons and get up enthusiastically in the middle of lunch to fry it and bring it back in a little white dish where the yolk glistened. Our eyes would glaze over. “But dip the bread in it, otherwise it will turn into nothing”. And one obeyed as never before, with two cheeks. Our grandmothers put croquettes in our mouths three at a time because they came from that old world where everything was missing and we had to juggle with the family rations. Hunger is never forgotten. Hunger leaves a bleeding hole forever. A humiliation. A vulnerability. A latent anxiety.
One eats for what one could not eat: one feeds one’s grandchildren for the times one did not have a crust of bread to put in one’s mouth. Food, like tobacco, is something that is explained by its absence. That’s what Houllebecq says: that you know you’re a smoker, especially when you don’t have a fucking cigarette for miles around. Something like that. That’s why it’s exciting that our grandmothers were so happy to see us eating, because food was dignity and prosperity, beauty, health and future.
No one is fat for a grandmother, but “beautiful” or “yearling”. “Child, eat, or you won’t grow” was the recurring threat. And one imagined oneself tiny, tiny, ever smaller and more insignificant, screaming alone before the deaf world, like Kafka’s bug or Roald Dahl’s mouse-children, so sullied now. And he ate. Stews, meats, fruits, dressed tomatoes. Snack, child, it’s six o’clock. Sausage sandwich. Cocoa. Biscuits. Eat or you’ll die, and you don’t want to die, you have a long life ahead of you and you have to be strong to face the bad guys. And we said yes to everything with our mouths full, because it was a pleasure and because we were also respecting authority and because we wanted “energy” to explore things and so that the times we scraped our knees running in the playground would heal quickly, because we had to keep playing.
One was afraid of being small, very small, and disappearing in the eyes of grandmothers, and grandmothers were afraid that we would disappear in the eyes of the world. Because there was an era where starvation condemned you to extinction, to a class extinction, and where short legs made you servile and defenceless before the gallantry and height of the señorito. Politically and emotionally, one has felt the need to earn one’s space, not to be relegated to the margins, to fill the room and exist with an expanded body. That is why we were taught to eat at two cheeks.
It is also interesting the capacity for love that is drawn from the event of the meal, or rather, that dialogues with it. When you love someone and you haven’t seen them all day, you like to ask them “and what did you eat today?”, because it is a simple way of knowing if they are well, if they have had time to sit down and eat, if they are nourished and satisfied, or if they have been kidnapped by obligations and the tyranny of bosses and terrifying agendas and have been chained to the chair with a plastic salad, because then everything is mechanical and servile.
One wants to see one’s own people eating at two cheeks, because we are basically our grandmother -a continuous walking homage to her-, and because if someone has an appetite it means they are not going to die, or not yet. As Gabriel Marcel said: “To love someone is to say to them: you will never die”. To love someone, therefore, is to feed them. To love someone is to fight against their extinction.
In eating with two cheeks, there is also a youthful and wonderfully unconscious impulse. Eating for real, without protocols. Eating on the spur of the moment, as if no one were watching. Eating wildly, with passion, with animal joy, like sinewy, relaxed kids who are not thinking about social corrections or, of course, about getting fat. Measuring food is an adult act and, therefore, an act of domestication.
Those who know about diplomacy say that at high-class parties you have to go already dined, because there is nothing more elegant than refusing the cocktail waiter the mini cod in batter. People are squealed by the fact that one is hungry, that is, that one has desire, because food is an erotic impulse. It seems that we become more sophisticated the further we move away from the deep hedonism of chewing and drinking with pleasure – the more we shake off the beast and embrace the cowardly citizen that inhabits us – but to me it still seems like a pose of frigidity and boredom.
Smile and don’t look for the ham with your eyes. Stop the instinct. Don’t get involved, be discreet. Participate in the conversation, but not too much. The fish dies by the mouth, they say, in everything, in everything, in everything.
Freedom is about something else. Freedom is anti-protocol, the death of rules and appearances. La Chiqui de Jerez summed it up masterfully in Me lo como todo’: “Me lo como todo, / los garbanzos del puchero / y las liebres con arroz / Me me me llaman La Chiqui / pero de chica no tengo ná’ / soy más alta que una torre / y doy más guerra que Vietnam / Y no tengo complejo / yo soy así porque quiso Dios / y en mi fardisquera llevo / un cuchillo, una cuchara y un tenedor / y si se presenta en algún momento oportunidad / me lo como todo”. Clearer than water.
Something similar was written by Gloria Fuertes: “I don’t know why I complain / because at last I’m alone / And the pleasure of throwing ashes on the floor / without anyone scolding you / and spreading bread in the sauce / and drinking the dregs, / and wiping your mouth with the back of your hand, / singing to the tramp because he was brave at last, / killing kisses as if they were lice, / drinking white, / pronouncing certain phrases / saying certain words, / exposing yourself to one day being erased from the payroll…. / I shouldn’t be serious / because I live the way I want to”. Eating with two cheeks could well be anarchist and a little isolating in this age of the anorexic and restrained handsome. Eating with two cheeks could well consist of being the king of your winter palace on your own, without anyone reproaching you for this or that.
The expression “eating with your mouth full” takes me straight back to the Matilda film, when Bruce Bogtrotter is caught by the redoubtable Miss Trunchbull stealing a piece of chocolate cake from the school kitchen. What more could we want. The notorious dictator forced him, in front of the entire student body, to eat the rest of the eternally thick cake, to the point of panic and anguish, under the pitying gaze of his classmates. “Come on, Bruce!” shouted Matilda. And little by little they seconded her. “Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce!” chanted his friends, until the boy rose to his feet and shoved the cake between his chest and back, victorious, defiant, getting on the Trunchbull’s nerves.
This was a poetic generational image, which apart from the obvious flouting of authority, amounted to something else: the awareness that in life we will have to eat our fill of displeasure – chugging, swallowing and chariots – for a greater and honourable end, which often consists of ending up shutting the mouth of someone who presumed that we “couldn’t” do something. My father always said: “You are now an anvil. Hang in there. It will be your turn to be a hammer”.
Eating with two cheeks can be unpleasant – for others – but also for oneself if one does not know how to manage one’s pleasures intelligently, like those absurd men who have contests of eating hot dogs until they explode. All so that they can put their crappy picture on a wall in the sebaceous premises. The philosopher Santiago Alba Rico explained it to me as follows: “Speed is imposed on us. We have to reclaim slowness in conversation, drinking and sexuality: this is a way of reclaiming pleasure in the face of hedonism, which ends up being very unpleasant”. Or, as Lola Flores explained, one can take “anything”, the important thing is “the method”. And it is also true.
Nevertheless, I recommend eating with your mouth full from time to time, which is like living with your mouth full, with impatience, with a drive for carpe diem and adventure, like skidding on a tiger, even if it always hurts afterwards. “We snogged with life / and our gums bled”, sings Rigoberta Bandini. It is an acceptable price to pay. You also learn things by bleeding. I’ll stick with what Calamaro intoned, in his own way, about eating at two cheeks, speed, excess and its bridge to radical autonomy. “What is true freedom? / To organise a violent protest / against slow life / That’s what I like about being free / like a free bird / looking for the bone / that one will never find”. Well, good riddance.