When he gets back from Caracas, where he attended the World Social Forum in April 2006 (he isn’t especially impressed by Chávez), Mauro announces that he’s decided to take the professional cook’s CAP exam. The people around him are baffled, they don’t understand: Why on earth would he choose the CAP (Certificate of Professional Aptitude)? In other words, why would he want the kind of diploma usually taken by the dregs of the national education system—people who will end up as manual workers, engineers, people who will never go to college—when he himself has spent years in further education and even holds a master’s in economics? Seriously, if he does this, then what was the point of the Erasmus and all that stuff? His parents, anticonformist to the last, support him, happy that their son has found his path, but they make it clear that as far as they’re concerned, this is his last year of subsidized study. Sometimes the specter of a loss of status rears its head, concealed under commonsense remarks: You’re too old, Mauro, you’d be better off working, learning on the job. But Mauro holds firm: in reality, not only is the CAP a gauge of credibility in a professional world that is wary of slackers, dilettantes, middle-class shirkers fascinated by the culinary arts, it is also a symbolic gauge, the sign that he is willing to put in the hard yards, to accept the physical, technical, and prescriptive aspects of being a cook, to knuckle under its disciplinary requirements, to enter the tiled, metal-strewn backstage areas of the grand theater of French gastronomy—cultural heritage and national pride—and join the anonymous, invisible ranks of those who work in the shadows for its conservation, its expansion, its glory.