Yellow smell and outdoor seatings
These days, the Chinese-woman’s bar has a faint yellow smell. It’s that yellow with hints of mustard and hamburger cheese, the scent of burger joints from the 80s, with those 1950s sauce dispenser squeeze bottles always placed on top of diner tables, still there even though no customer has ever used them.
One of these restaurants with that yellow smell and the smell of unused yellow, white, red in clear bottles was Oskar in Móstoles (I think there was another one in the city of Madrid, but I was never in that one). It had an outdoor seating made of garish, shrill metal, always with a shrill metallic sound even when no one dragged or touched the chairs or tables, always placed outside even on the bitterest winter days (without the heating systems of today’s outside seating).
Long before the first McDonald’s opened in the area, Oskar was offering its distinctive yellow scent and the strident, metallic, silver hum of its outdoor seating on the wide corner of a modern, poor, bustling, urban, commercial neighbourhood on the outskirts of Móstoles, next to the Extremadura-Madrid highway.
It was a literally dark hood, with elements that were exceptional for the Móstoles ecosystem. For example (and in conjunction with the literal darkness of the place), it was possible to see black boys walking its streets, at a time when it was not easy to find a black person, neither in this town nor anywhere else in the country.
Oskar burger joint, which I’d find beguiling in its danger and complex constitution, seemed simply and plainly filthy to my mother, and I would never have eaten there if it hadn’t been for the occasional Saturday evenings when my brother and his then-girlfriend, or my sister and her then-boyfriend, or both couples at once would take us to eat on the outdoor seating of undead, autonomous silver hum.
The first time in my life I saw a black person, however, was not in that hamburger place. I saw him in person (I was little and had never seen one, not on television or anywhere else). I turned to my mother to ask what was wrong with that fellow, and she just told me nothing was wrong and to shut up.
On another occasion, when no one had asked her to, she was more substantial and talkative and less low-profile. We were having dinner at a restaurant (another one, and indoors) and she, while watching at a couple at a table, said: ‘Look how he’s eating’…
I did it. ‘He’ was a young black man calmly eating roast chicken with a knife and fork, chewing with his mouth closed, his expression tranquil, across from a suave, white girl with long, naturally blonde hair and delicate features, friendly, yet taciturn demeanour. At once cheerful and taciturn. She reminded me of my brother’s girlfriends (before the one who’d later have dinner with us on the metallic outdoor seating and then become his wife and the mother of his children), nice, pretty girls who always took a liking to me, waving through the fence of my nursery school playground and giving me sweets and conversation.
Even now, I wonder what special element I was supposed to have noticed when, at my mother’s request, I watched that girl’s obscure boyfriend eat his roast chicken at the establishment.
The day after those words, I went to my Chinese friend’s bar for takeaway coffee, and this time the yellow smell had brighter, more citrusy hints, like damper but less dirty, grimey, oily, greasy, fat… I looked down and discovered it was all coming from — the floor cleaner!
Such a twist opened up a field of connections for my research that I couldn’t have foreseen.