Few things are more complicated than the choice of the mustache, that small hair parcel that can determine more than any other trait the first judgment we make of a stranger (or stranger). There are pyramidal ones, there are leafy ones like a brush, finely drawn, with curly tails at the ends, mustaches with soft adolescent fluff, authoritative mustaches that hide the gestures of the mouth, and then there is that of Pablo Messiez (Buenos Aires, 49 years old). , which has the expressiveness of an eyebrow and the exact proportions to resist any typecasting.
I look at it deep in thought, it makes me imagine what kind of mustache would suit me. I can’t help but look at myself in Messiez as if I were a mirror: he just discovered that we were born on the same day. Just as there is a namesake word for those who share the same name, there should be a specific one for those who share birthdays. It is inevitable to observe them in search of other coincidences that clarify whether having fallen to the world on a certain date has any specific effect on one’s destiny—if someone believes in destiny. Messiez clearly has one inescapable: the theater. He arrived in Spain in 2008 as a theater actor, and faced with the prospect of having to neutralize his Argentine accent to improve his luck as an actor, he turned to theater directing and writing. Since then he has already premiered several plays and has collaborated with his friend the singer Sílvia Pérez Cruz in something unclassifiable that they titled impossible genrea piece between music and dramaturgy.
We find ourselves at the Llama Inn, a Peruvian restaurant with a dangerous cocktail menu that makes you thirstier than it quenches, and some tasty dishes that the waitress assures are to be shared (although perhaps not to be shared with Basques) and that reveal to a Messiez with exquisite manners, always willing to serve himself last and offer the remaining portion to others. Perhaps it is that food has stopped caring at this very moment. He is somewhat circumspect, silently meditating on the question I just asked him: what would his last dinner be like, where, who would he invite, what would he eat.
Shortly after he returns from his inner journey to tell with a grave gesture that he thinks about an exercise he does with his students: “I ask them to close their eyes and I ask them what things their eyes saw when they were five years old, they have to use names, details of objects , I want you to paint a scene… Then, what did your eyes see at the age of seven, at fifteen. Thus we arrive at the present, so I make them open their eyes and ask what things their eyes see now. They say the wall, you, whatever they’re looking at. Then I ask what things their eyes will see tomorrow. They begin to improvise, to imagine things. Finally I ask: what is the last thing they will see. Then there is a modest silence, which is very beautiful, and that is the same silence I am in now… I feel as if imagining the end was suddenly going to happen”. Coco Dávez intervenes to encourage him, for a playwright it should be gratifying to write the script for his own finale. Messiez does not think so: “It seems that it is a gift and it is a sentence to have to choose the end.”
He would eat alone with his family, which are his parents, his sister, who lives in the countryside in Buenos Aires, and his little brother, who is a musician in New York. “We have a super strong sisterly bond, we love each other so much,” she says. Dinner will be something very homemade, flavors from childhood: “My mother’s Milanese, my father’s roast.” But he would also add something very sophisticated to the menu that he had never eaten before and that he cannot name: “Until the last day I would like to be trying something new.”
Suddenly, he wants to expand the table, a barbecue calls for many. Let friends come, a committee of about 50 people, “which is a good number to be able to dance but without losing sight of anyone”. She only names one of them: Sílvia Pérez Cruz, because she wanted her to sing that night “in that loving and warm way”. She then wonders if she has 50 close friends. She surely she does not answer. “But I would like the people with whom I share time to be there, even if they are not close, especially those who worked on my latest plays”, because theater generates very deep bonds in a short time, she explains.
After friends and music broke into the intimacy of a dinner that began as a family gathering, he asks, lowering his voice and looking to the sides with some prudence: “I thought about drugs too, can you put that on?” I tell him that as many as he wants, and I tell him that a considerable part of those whom I ask about their last dinner are more clear about the drugs they would take —many of them hard substances that they would try for the first time in their lives— than the menu composition. Messiez laughs with relief: “Thank God, because taking drugs and knowing that you won’t have a hangover is the best thing that can happen to you in life.” The hangover, he clarifies, is what keeps him away from drugs.
That night, drunkenness seems necessary: ”It would be good to remove the idea of sadness, the idea of the end.” And then he remembers that, precisely in the work he has in hand, a character revives and proclaims: “Death is your invention.” [de los hombres] that you believe yourself to be the center of the universe, nothing dies, everything changes and the universe has no center”. Then he realizes and points out that the world of drugs with his family would be something delicate. “We don’t have that relationship: don’t let them read this,” she says. So he decides to divide the last supper into different acts, one in which drugs enter and another for the family, but the truth is that he would like both to appear in the final act, and that there would be no fear or reproaches: “That everyone understands that this is not about suffering, but about what follows, about transformation into whatever, without fear of it”.
We went on to define the place: without a doubt, the sea. He would take his whole family on a trip to the Mediterranean, he is not too sure in which specific place, it is a generic and ideal Mediterranean, an empty island, Formentera without people. “Though that’s impossible even in October,” she says with a laugh. He sees the diners get into the sea between courses, and Sílvia sing her songs. Later they would all sing tangos and boleros… and Argentine rock. “Songs with which she has a long history, having sung them a lot in adolescence, Charly García, Fito Páez”, she specifies. Soon the verbal and gastronomic phase of the night would be overcome to fully enter the dance, which is the most important thing. There would be a lot of dancing, and of course there would be Lucas, his partner, who is a dancer, and already with the effect of what was ingested, and with the music, the dance would become a pure trance. To do this, he recommends that people dress in “light clothing that flutters in the wind, clothes with a lot of color that look good while dancing and that can be easily removed.” That night would be very sensual, “erotic-festive, a lot of skin, a lot of skin, a lot of skin, everyone merged with the world.”
Messiez falls back into an introspective silence while trying a ceviche. For a moment it seems that she has gone to the dance that she imagines. But he is savoring, and the food awakens in him the urge to change the menu. We are at sea, we have to serve fish, she says. Coco Dávez allows him to put all the food he wants on that final menu, and then Messiez raises his ambition and says that he would make a gastronomic biography with the dishes that have defined the times of his life. As an appetizer, his mother’s Milanese with puree — “I know it’s not a very light starter” — then his father’s roast with vegetables, he would continue with ham — “which when I came to live in Spain was a revelation for me ”—, and from there he would enter fish hand in hand with Japan, leave wine and move on to sake. “I would return to the terroir for desserts with a dulce de leche ice cream, and I would ask my sister to make an apple or plum pie”, he concludes.
I want to know if, being a man who has dedicated his life to the theater in such a way, he wouldn’t want there to be something typical of his art in all this banquet. He hadn’t thought about it, he says, but the sea is the best setting. I would put a frame and people would come out to represent what they wanted with the sea in the background. He envy that spontaneity of the musicians to start with a song in a after-dinner, the so natural way in which that is already enabled in the context of a festive dinner, while theater people are more modest and it is not so easy for them to get up from suddenly to interpret a fragment of something that they liked. “There is that idea of no, I can’t here, don’t fuck with me, I’m not going to act now. And I say: why not, it would be nice to hear someone say, ‘I remember something very exciting that I interpreted and I want to share it right now with you…’, and it is that discovering something nice to people is a strategy for them to they love you, which is what I want to happen that night”.
Messiez Menu
- His mother’s Milanese with mashed potatoes.
His father’s roast meat and vegetables.
Acorn-fed Iberian ham.
Niguiris, makis and fish sashimi. - Her sister’s apple pie.
Dulce de leche ice cream. - Red wines.
Sake. - Songs by Sílvia Pérez Cruz.
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Source: Elpais