Where Does Ignacio Pereyra-Lund Go When the Forecast Says Sun?
Buenos Aires has had five dry days in a row and the best-known grill in Barracas has not been lit once. I asked its owner where he is.
The grill at La Gotera is cold at 8:10 on a Wednesday. Outside, Barracas is 22 degrees and the sky is the blue of a hotel pool. Ignacio Pereyra-Lund sits on an upturned crate with a mate, looking at the iron as if it owes him money.
"It's resting," he says.
I have interviewed people for eleven years. I know the sound of a man buying time. I ask what he does on a dry day. He says he thinks about fire. I ask what that looks like. He says it looks like thinking.
Here is what everyone in the neighbourhood already knows. Pereyra-Lund lights the grill when it rains and only then. Forty minutes before the first drop he starts to stack the quebracho. By the time the gutters are running, the coals are white. He has done this for years. Regulars check the sky before they book. A woman at the bakery on the corner says she plans her week by his smoke.
So the question is simple. A warm spring week, a full dining room, a kitchen that could feed sixty. Why leave it dark?
"Meat tastes different in the rain," he says. I say that is a nice sentence, and ask what it means. He says the air is heavy, the smoke stays low, the fat behaves. I ask if he has ever tested this. He pours more water into the gourd.
I try again. What do the cooks do on dry days? One of them, a young man peeling garlic by the window, says they make empanadas and wait. Another says Ignacio sweeps the roof. Twice, he says, Ignacio has swept the roof when it was already clean.
Ignacio says the garlic man is new.
I do not think the rain theory is a lie. I think it is a very good rule that has turned into a place to hide. A rule like that is easy to keep in a wet week. In a dry week it asks you to stand in a cold kitchen at eight in the morning and explain yourself to a stranger with a microphone she has not switched on.
I ask one last time. If the forecast said sun for a month, would he light it?
He looks at the grill for a long while. The low sun comes through the high window and lies across the iron in a long yellow bar.
"Come back Friday," he says. "They say Friday, rain."
