RAMON CABAU GAUSCH: A ‘POET OF THE OVENS’

His calling card read simply: “Ramon Cabau Gausch, Agricultor “--farmer.

Cabau was indeed a farmer, raising flowers, mushrooms, salad greens, fava beans and peas, and other gentle crops on his handsome finca in Canet de Mar, just northeast of Barcelona--but he was far more than that, too. He was a licensed pharmacist; he held a law degree and, as founder (in 1962) and longtime owner of the top-rated Barcelona restaurant called Agut d’Avignon, he was one of the most important figures in contemporary Spanish gastronomy--as influential and unique in his own part of Spain, Catalonia, as an Alice Waters or a Wolfgang Puck are in America.

Cabau was a trim, good-looking man, dapper, a bit of a dandy, with bright eyes and a superb mustache. He nearly always wore a bow tie and a hat--usually a straw boater in the summertime and a Tyrolean affair surmounted by an immense feather in colder weather. His smile was infectious. Alice Waters, who met and cooked for Cabau last year in Barcelona, thought he was like a character of her beloved Pagnol--unquenchably warm, vital, definitely Mediterranean. Locals called him “a Barcelona myth” and “a poet of the ovens.”

Late every afternoon, it is said, when the lunch crowd at his restaurant had thinned out, Cabau used to sit down in his restaurant by himself to a simple lunch--boiled rice, maybe, with boiled hake moistened with olive oil--drab food eaten with health in mind. But his customers ate richly and exquisitely--elaborate fish stews, chicken braised with shrimp and lobster, goose with turnips, beef with wild mushrooms. The King of Spain himself is said to have come to Agut d’Avignon just for the fried potatoes.

In fact, though, say his friends, Cabau wasn’t even really a chef himself--but he understood food, from the time it was raised until the time it was set down on the table, perhaps better than any other man in Spain. “He used to watch every plate that came out of the kitchen,” one Cabau intimate remembers, “and would stop it if the least thing was wrong. He could tell at a glance if a dish was overcooked, and even--by sight alone, mind you--if it was too salty.”

Like Waters, too, Cabau celebrated the importance of the freshest, best raw materials--and proved that they really did make a difference. He established standards, trained chefs, inspired other restaurateurs, gave a whole new flavor to his region’s already-delicious cuisine.

In 1984, despite his considerable success, Cabau announced that he was retiring, sold his restaurant and repaired to his farm where he became a full-time agricultor . This, at least, assured him continued contact with an institution that was even more important to him than Agut d’Avignon had been--La Boqueria, the main Barcelona food market, a cavernous 19th-Century structure that has been called the most beautiful public market in the world.

Here, it was Cabau who was king. Everybody in the market knew and loved him. La Boqueria was his second home--maybe even his first one. He always said, a friend from the market recalled not long ago, that La Boqueria was his life, that he had in a sense been born there.

He also died there. On March 31, at about 8 in the morning, which was his usual hour, Cabau entered the market bringing a load of mushrooms, wild asparagus and riotously colorful flowers. He sold his produce, then made the rounds, handing out the flowers to some of the stall-keepers as presents. He next drank a coffee at the Bar Pinotxo, his favorite stop. Then he took a plastic glass from his pocket, dropped a large white tablet into it and filled it up with water.

With the glass in hand, he strolled through the market to the stand of a particularly close friend, Llorenc Petras, who sells wild mushrooms and snails at the back of the building. A woman of Cabau’s acquaintance passed by and, seeing the glass, asked, “What, Senor Ramon? You’re drinking medicine?” He replied, “It’s the best medicine for heartache.”

Petras meanwhile had left the stand for a few moments. In his absence, Cabau handed his assistant a letter addressed to the mushroom-seller, then walked off towards the market office, glass still in hand. Petras returned, opened the letter at once and then raced after his friend. He was too late. Cabau had drunk the contents of the glass--an autopsy would show that it contained potassium cyanide--and had fallen to his knees before the office door. As Petras reached him, Cabau spoke his last words: “I think this will be quicker.” Petras held him in his arms, and remembers smelling the strong bitter-almond scent of the poison on his breath.

Everyone who knew him was shocked by Cabau’s suicide. It was known that he was subject to deep depressions, that he had had family problems, that he had recently been maddeningly immobilized by a broken leg, that he often felt alone--but nobody, not even his closest friends, had realized the gravity of the 62-year-old Cabau’s despair. He had been full of new plans, in fact: He was preparing a series of TV programs on Catalan gastronomy and a series of classes for a local hotel school; he had been offered a plum job as a tourism consultant by the government of Catalonia; he had even talked of opening another restaurant in Barcelona. . . .

Cabau visited La Boqueria one last time. On April 2, the morning of his funeral, the hearse bearing his body to Montjuic cemetery paused at the portals of the market. Thousands of people, from within La Boqueria and without, crowded around the vehicle, covering it with wreaths reading “A l’amic Ramon” (“To friend Ramon”). Then they applauded thunderously--”as if,” one newspaper account suggested, “saluting a perfect performance in a successful opera.”