Losing a pressure cooker is really hard, genius. It is accessible to only a few. I have a hard time imagining the mysterious and unfortunate steps that would have to be taken to make this happen. But my mother did. Sometimes doing things wrong takes as much ingenuity as doing them right, and more merit. Neither she nor we—the children, brothers, sisters-in-law, nephews, granddaughters—explain to each other how the old, rickety pots were stolen from our control. What a wonderful carambola that happened! Impossible to imagine. Perhaps it is true that we are experiencing – not in the family, but in humanity – a profound crisis of imagination. At this point, the only thing that is certain is that we have been searching for Destiny for three months with no results. Three months. We are so confused – only my mother is sad – that we cannot even be sure whether three months is a long time or a short time, and whether we will continue like this for several more times or more.
The pressure cooker obsession has produced gruesome scenes, such as seeing someone opening cupboards, or lifting a pull-out sofa out of a bed, to make sure it's not there. Forgetting it won't be easy. It takes up too much space in our heads. “Do you know anything about a pressure cooker?” It is the second or third most common comment when two relatives meet. Checkout takes 1 minute. The tone has changed at this time. Now we are installed in the wedge. But to get here, we spent weeks stuck in a daze. There was an urgent need for the news, as if finding the pressure cooker to start cooking the hock was a matter of life and death.
He lost his touch
Each family member searched his home. Not once, not twice. Since it hasn't appeared yet, my mother comes in and says, “You must have it. Didn't I send you the broth a while ago?”, and starts looking for it since I've already done it. Which is weird, but it didn't appear that way either. My mother was always the one who found all the things. He had this great power. Suddenly he spent on it. He lost his touch.
But two weeks ago something strange happened. I was in Madrid with Serge Bames, and I heard him explain that years ago he went to the Lost Property Office to write a chronicle. He was amazed that this office was actually called the Office of Found Objects: he was not surprised. “I think the name explains what Catalonia is like.” That place was eye candy. There was everything and the strangest things. “There were about eight pressure cookers.” I was stunned for a moment as I tried to comprehend what I had just heard. And then I said it didn't seem strange at all to me that there were eight pressure cookers in that office. “Barcelona is a big place, and compared to what you might think, losing a pressure cooker is common.” I explained to him how in my family we were looking for exactly one, and that what he had just explained gave me new encouragement, because although there were unfortunate people who had lost their pressure cookers, there was someone else who had found them. There was hope. I don't rule out finding it in Barcelona.
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