by Laia Jufresa
I’ve thanked him for this show of pedantry on numerous occasions, though never in person. His crescendo of rude little grunts during those ten minutes inevitably put me on Noelia’s side. I already knew her by name, because she was one of those people who stands up and introduces herself before making a comment, you know the type?
I answered her calmly, congratulated her on her worthy mission, and talked to her about the historical role of food as celebration and the national role of food as love. I underlined the importance of eating protein and umami to promote the feeling of satiation, and for the umpteenth time I sung the praises of amaranth and its huge protein content. There were more questions afterward, probably about my main topic, because no one likes to hear that amaranth is a pseudo-cereal (it throws them into a tizzy: ‘If it tastes like a cereal and smells like a cereal, then it must be a type of grain, like rice, or wheat’). And the whole thing would have ended right there if it hadn’t been for Noelia coming up to me at the end of the conference to ask what this umami was, and me answering, in part because it was true, ‘Ah, but you can only really explain umami in a restaurant.’
That’s how it all began, and that night we had dinner and went to bed together, and then I lost the plot for a year, shacked up with Memphis, had a dream, looked for Noelia, married her – all thanks to umami – and then, as quickly as they’d come around, the seventies were over and 1982 was upon us: the country fell apart and soon afterward, one Sunday, on the outskirts of Chiconcuac, I fell off my bike.
*
I’m going to say it now, while I can’t feel Noelia anywhere near: today I went to the cemetery and got lost. It took me twenty minutes to find her gravestone, even though I know exactly where it is. It was as if someone had removed my chip. That can’t be normal.
*
The Mexican peso crashing in 1982 wasn’t anything new, but me falling off my bike certainly was. I’d been a cyclist all my life and had never suffered more than a scratch. Then, before I knew it, I’d split my left tibia in three pieces and shattered my collarbone. My helmet saved my life, but I still had a few fractures in my skull and two hematomas that took years to be absorbed. Or maybe months, but they were some seriously long months.
It wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last financial meltdown the country would see, but that didn’t mean it was any less of a nightmare. The Mexdollar debacle hit us right between the balls. Practically overnight, what few savings we had were reduced to a pittance, and what was left went on the hospital bill. Thanks to Noelia I received the best medical attention imaginable. But not even that stopped me having to take time off work. I didn’t leave the house for four glorious months. I drew in bed (very Frida Kahlo, but sans the tash, because every morning Doña Sara would bring me my shaving stuff). From that prostrate position, and from so much staring out the window, for the first time I had the feeling our great property was being wasted.
I inherited pigheadedness along with the land, and refused point black to sell up to the real-estate investment parasites. But while I convalesced in the house, all doped up and serene, it occurred to me that I too could make a profit off my plot, why not? Another important factor was that I was spending more time than ever in the company of Doña Sara, who helped us in the house and who, during that period, trotted up and down the stairs with my meals. And Doña Sara, who talked non-stop, whether there was someone there to listen or not, lived in a rented apartment. All day long she’d blather on to me about this or that neighbor, or complain about the landlord, a ‘waste of space’ who did nothing but ‘live off his tenants’ rent’. This living off your tenants’ rent didn’t seem too bad an idea to me in the midst of the financial crisis. And that’s more or less how the seed for the mews was sown. But the truly defining factors in its construction, which didn’t begin until five years later, were the sketches I produced, and the damage caused by the infamous earthquake of 1985.
*
We always said we came to the decision together, but deep down I think the choice not to have children (and later on to have them) was hers. I think I would have gone along with whatever she decided. We never put it in those exact terms, but there’s no doubt that I was always more comfortable granting her wishes than imposing my own. Conceding makes you feel like a good person. Imposing your wishes makes you feel pushy. I had an extraordinarily domineering father, who I always did everything in my power to avoid resembling. And one surefire way to make sure you don’t turn into a pushy father is to not become a father at all. Children scared me. Noelia was the eldest of four kids. She started changing diapers aged six. I’m an only child. I think of the diaper not as a great invention but as a deeply mystifying artifact, and I’m as much disgusted by the things themselves as by their contents.
‘That,’ remarks Noelia, ‘is your offspringhood speaking.’
And that may be. But when later I asked Páez his thoughts on the matter he just answered, ‘Diapers? Never heard of him…’
*
‘Am I going senile?’ is what I wish I could ask Páez.
*
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think about how much I took the name Noelia Vargas Vargas for granted. My legs fill up with a kind of black energy and I want to kick something. But the most I ever do is punch the bedspread; more like a child throwing a tantrum than a fully grown, raging man. I should have used her name so much more. I should have taken it in vain. I threw away thousands, millions of chances to savor it in my mouth. When I spoke about her I would say ‘my wife’. When I called her I said ‘love’. When I messaged her I wouldn’t even greet her. I wrote pithily, as if we were immortal:
‘You home for lunch?’
*
Noelia liked the word ‘project’. It made her feel organized. She used to say that we shared a ‘life project’. But, with all due respect and not even caring if she reads this, I think she never fully understood what the term entails. A project is a thing you start up, get excited about, get stuck on, lock horns with, and later, if you’re proud and bold and humble and arrogant and very stubborn, you tackle all the loose ends and finish it. What usually follows is a postnatal bewildered phase, and then finally a feeling of serenity comes over you, and with that the sad realization that nothing has changed, and that in all likelihood nobody really cares about your work. Then comes a kind of peace, and after that, God knows how, the seed of curiosity for a new project sprouts in you. You set about replowing the soil and start all over again. That’s how I’ve worked my entire life. That’s how I’ve done everything I’ve ever done: the mews, the Modern Milpa, every single publication. Only now I can’t seem to formulate a plan of attack. The plants are dying around me. I bathe The Girls grudgingly and half-heartedly. I just drink and write short paragraphs that don’t really follow on from one another and that I bet not even Nina Simone is that fussed about. I’m not even a good drinker. By the third tequila I have to have a lie down, and if I sit down to write, everything comes out jumbled. And with things as they are – with no beginning, no end, no bonus points for publishing these pages – I’ve got neither a project nor any chance of getting over this lackluster routine. I’ll probably go on like this for the rest of my days. Linda asked me the other afternoon if we might not be turning into alcoholics. I told her we weren’t, that we’re C4 plants like amaranth: more efficient in our use of liquids, and capable of producing the same amount of biomass with a smaller amount of water.
‘Biomass?’ she asked.
‘Tears,’ I said.
All I’m saying with this project business is that Noelia undervalued my capacity for coming up with projects. She thought she had it in her as well. And while she had so many more talents than I did, I have to say that in this one thing I outdid her. She never had to work in that self-fueling, self-sustaining way, because she had one, ongoing assignment: a constant line of patients. And they were like the same patient repeated interminably. That’s why something in me protested when she’d use the wor
d project. A silent protest, obviously, because Noelia would talk about the ‘life project’ with unflagging authority, oozing self-confidence as if she were explaining the circulatory system. Even her voice changed. She might say, for example, in that firm tone of hers, ‘Alfonso, you agree this whole reproduction business doesn’t have any place in our life project, right?’
And what would I say? I can’t even remember now. I smiled at her, I guess. Or said, ‘Right.’ And the truth is I did agree with her. Noelia and I always agreed. When we didn’t agree on something, we got over it straight away. We would shout at each other; she had a penchant for slamming doors, and I for grabbing my jacket and walking around the block. And that would be that. We’d be over it. But it’s different now. Now we really are in deadlock. Now I’d give anything for one of our fights.
Here’s my final say on her misusage of the term. If what we shared had indeed been a life project, we would have wrapped it up together. I thought about it at the time, but knew that she wouldn’t have any of it, just as I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it. So our life together wasn’t a project, then; it was the other kind of commitment: the ongoing-assignment kind. Which would also explain why the longer she’s gone, the more I seem to need her.
*
The world is full of iotas, iguanas, indents, ignoramuses, indoctrinators, imposers, ifs and illusions. If you ask me, we’re nothing but a bunch of idiots.
*
I’m in a rotten mood after reading an article in today’s paper in which, once again, they propagate the myth that it was only corn that was grown on the manmade chinampa islands of Lake Xochimilco. Please! How many more studies do we have to publish before the schools will teach the truth: that they planted huautli, sacred amaranth, there. It was all over the place, and the Mexica ate the stem, leaves, and seeds, which they milled to make flour. The flour constituted a foodstuff of course, but it was also used for offerings. The Mexica built figurines of gods, piercing them with small thorns which they’d already stuck into their own flesh to catch a drop of blood. The Spanish were no fools banning amaranth: having one less source of energy was fine by them as long as it meant fewer local rituals to write off. They razed kilometers of plantations, and came up with severe punishments for whoever planted it. And with that, huautli was wiped from the face of their land and erased from memory, with the kind of decisive success that only the most heavily armed militaries can pull off. They masterminded a new history, – ‘There’s only ever been corn here!’ – and we swallowed it. In Mexico we became obsessed with milpas; some of us still are, two decades and several books later. And yes, yes, milpas are fascinating, as are the pyramids. But there’s something beyond the monumental; something just as beautiful yet much simpler, that takes place in the private lives of others: holiness on a familial scale, where food and ritual are one and the same.
But none of those little things – amaranth, or the daily miracles of faith and routine – are of any interest to pop scientists or documentary makers, who have a tendency to confuse greatness, grandeur, and grandiloquence. Either that, or they simply don’t want to see it. Exactly the same as the tour guides who refuse to explain that the two windows in the famous Tulum pyramid are actually a form of lighthouse. They’ve done tests. People from the institute used candles to project light through the opening as the Mayans did to guide their small boats along the sole canal that spared them from having to run aground on the rocky peninsula. The Mesoamerican reef is the second largest in the world: it starts in Yucatán and ends in Honduras. It’s fascinating to see how they navigated the area, but the hoteliers on the coast don’t seem to think so.
‘A lighthouse!’ they say. ‘Boring! Better to cross that out and write in the official texts “A temple”.’ As if it were better to be fanatical than resourceful!
It winds me up, even now, that so many of our discoveries are systematically ignored at the hands of the ignoramus machistus pharaonicus. Sometimes I honestly think that we’re only working in the institute for the benefit of gringo academics: we’re their manufacturers of juicy details. The things we discover through our research in this country will only see the light of day years later, over there. And by there I mean, at a safe distance from the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education. It’ll go like this: one day some overeducated little gringo who hasn’t eaten a single crumb of amaranth in his life is going to write a book call Amaranthus, and in that book he’ll include all the stuff I’ve been saying for years. Or maybe he’ll use the Náhuatl word, to give it an autochthonous edge: Huautli for Dummies, on sale in all good retailers and airports. They’ll offer the gringo tenure in Berkeley, and then the Chinese, who already plant more amaranth than anyone, will have themselves a whole new market: middle-class America (so lost in questions of diet, so lacking in tradition, so at the mercy of the latest food-group elimination fad). Tell Me What To Eat could be a description in five words of the average, educated gringo. They’ll put that processed Chinese amaranth in shiny packaging, advertise it on TV and export it like plastic toys. In Mexico we’ll buy it at crazy prices, and if you dare try and tell a kid it’s no more than an alegría, those seed bars we’ve always eaten in Mexico, he’ll knock you out with his fortified fist. I can only hope I’m dead by then.
*
Every now and then I take a trip to the little corner store, for beer or something, but Beto does my big shops, for which I’m very grateful. And I’m not just saying that in case I drop dead at my laptop. I’ve been thinking about this ever since Noelia died: Which of the neighbors is going to let people know if I kick the bucket? And who would they tell? The institute? And my colleagues, what would they do? Put me in a box with the institute’s initials on it? Bury me among some ruins like a national heritage piece? I doubt it. Whoever finds me will have to do no more than dump me, unceremoniously, out with the trash. Maybe I’ll start to smell. Me, who always scrubbed up so well! My guess is that Beto will be the first to get a whiff of me, when he brings the groceries. Hence why, even though I didn’t tell him it was for this reason, I gave him a set of keys. Whenever I hear him come in I go downstairs and offer him a beer – just because; because we’re alive –, and he almost always accepts. We sit out on the terrace overlooking the dead MM, where once upon a time the deep pink of the amaranth flowers swayed in the wind, and we make fruitless plans to pull up the dead plants and put in a barbecue or a small swimming pool. We chat about anything and everything until it’s time for him to collect his daughter from ballet, or whatever it is. Beto talks to me and asks me questions; he’s generous and takes an interest. Now that I think about it, Beto is one of very few men I’ve met in my life who I feel I can trust. Maybe because his wife left him. Or maybe that’s why she left. Deep down, I think I’m one of those types, too. But maybe it’s just my ego talking, and really I’m a person who inspires pure indifference. Better indifference than repugnance, of course, but it’s not as honorable as trust. Not a callous indifference, not at all, but rather the natural product of years spent trying to go by unnoticed. Add chronic shyness to a good marriage and a series of solitary habits and you’ve got a perfect recipe for disappearance. You turn into a kind of Casper the Ghost: friendly but one hundred percent dispensable. As a boy, if anyone asked me which magic power I’d choose, I always went for time travel. I wanted to see without being seen. And really I think that this is what defines all anthropologists: a natural tendency to observe and a healthy dose of curiosity for all things human, but without ever reaching the levels of sensibility of the artist, the solemnity of the philosopher, or the opportunism of the lawyer. Our healthy curiosity isn’t quite the systematic, slightly obsessive rigor of the spy or the scientist, and we’re far from boasting the deductive inventiveness of the sociologist, or the novelist’s discipline. But I guess you could say we have a little of all these things, if you’re a glass-half-full kind of guy.
*
After a few days of rigorous observation I can confirm that a) people sti
ll dodge me on the street (they don’t look at me, but they do still step out of my way, which means, physically speaking at least, I’m still perceptible), and b) for the first time this year I’m not thinking about dying soon, not now I can feel a project coming on (albeit one within the limits imposed by permanent grief). I have no intention of dying, not now that I’ve teamed up with Nina Simone, AKA Brown Sugar, and, for the first time in forty years, I’m daring to write without footnotes.
*
This is my new life on sabbatical: I don’t set a morning alarm, and my eyes open automatically sometime between eight and nine. Considering the horror stories I was told as a boy, it seems I’m one of the lucky ones. Or maybe it’s not that all old folk get insomnia, just that they like to exaggerate. If I had a kid to guilt-trip about how early I rise, believe me I would.
Once up, I shower, get dressed, and make myself a coffee. I’ve gone back to drinking it how I did when I was a pretentious student and believed that the devil was in the detail, as long as that detail was European: from an Italian stovetop espresso maker, straight. Noelia liked coffee from the machine, and since it didn’t taste of anything, we consumed it in quantities wholly inappropriate for people our age.